"Beautiful, flashy, but more of the same"

Before I begin, I must confess that I'm more of a Starcraft/Warcraft fan. This review will focus heavily on strategic depth and replay value, as these are the factors that drive the success of Blizzard's games and are the reasons why they are the standard in cash tournaments while C&C games are not.

Tiberium Wars comes as a late successor to what I've always felt was the cooler of the two C&C universes. The concept of Tiberium is simply so much more interesting (and apocalyptic) than the silly "COMMIES WITH MIND CONTROL!!" theme of Red Alert.

Graphics, Sound & Art Direction: 9.5/10
It's never just the graphics horse power that makes a game eye candy, which is why I've included Art Direction in this category.

Tiberium Wars really is the most beautiful RTS yet. While the graphics engine may not pull off as many stunts as Supreme Commander, the art direction is what really puts Tiberium Wars in the throne. Each faction has very unique visual identities but at the same time, each unit within each faction still manages to stand out visually (this is where Supreme Commander fails in art direction, with its armies of poorly differentiated, identical looking ants). In particular, the Scrin is artistically an impressive union of insect and machine. I subtracted .5 for two reasons: 1. Infantry units are still too small and difficult to discern and differentiate; especially with the increased level of detail and complexity of the terrain. 2. TOO MANY BEAM WEAPONS makes this look like another lame sci-fi title.

Storyline: 7/10
Again, I love the Tiberium universe and the mysteries surrounding the strange substance is definitely going to keep you cranking throughout the campaign to find out what happens next. The Scrin campaign, while short, is sufficient at explaining the nature of their civilization and is definitely the most exciting (but last) part of the campaigns. While the concept of Tiberium and the Scrin are really cool, C&C could really work on its story-telling techniques. Conspicuously missing from the storyline are characters which you can identify with. This is true for most of the C&C games: even though you spend a considerable amount of face time with the characters via cinematic videos, none of them (besides Kane) make a lasting impressing. The acting is piss-poor not because of the poor cast, but because of the cheesy script. This really hurts the feeling of immersion in the story and the makers of C&C could do well to learn from Blizzard's masterful storytelling skills (hell, Starcraft had nothing but talking heads on 4 TV screens and yet most of the cast are highly recognized in the gaming world...there really is an art to story telling)

Music: 8.5/10
A high quality and epic-themed soundtrack is included. But for some reason, only the title screen music is played during multiplayer and skirmishes. Considering most of the replay value comes from multiplayer, I think C&C3 players will be REALLY sick of that song over the coming weeks until EA releases a patch to randomize the soundtrack.

Gameplay: The most important part of any RTS will broken into sub categories

Interface and Controls: 6/10
Traditional it may be, the classic C&C interface is clearly suboptimal for strategy games and I will give this category a bad score so long as the series clings on to this silly tradition. On top of that, several new issues mar the control experience of Tiberium Wars:

Building placement is extremely unpredictable. When placing a new building, a perfectly reasonable looking patch of ground will often for some odd reason, be invalid. Buildings seem to have MUCH bigger clipping paths their their graphics, because you have to leave pretty big gaps between buildings otherwise the game complains of overlap.

Scrolling the screen has "acceleration", when you hit the edge of your screen or use right-click dragging, the scrolling process starts out slow and speeds up. This is extremely annoying when making minor adjustments to your view. Edge scrolling is so slow its almost unusable, making right-click dragging the new standard way to scroll.

Units are not very responsive. Move orders have minor delays, and many vehicles have turning radius. While realistic this may be, this is a nightmare for micro, in fact. I'd say you'll never see the kind amazing micro found in SC/WC games in C&C3 .

Fog of war prevents most types of special actions. Want your engineer to capture a distant Tiberium spike? First you have to MOVE your engineer, and THEN once the spike is in sight, the "capture" command becomes available. Why can't I just tell him to capture right from the start? This is very annoying because engineers move very slowly and by the time he reaches his destination, you often forget all about him.

Hotkeys are organized sequentially and often require two buttons. Unlike Blizzard games where each unit and action have memorable phonetic hotkey like "m"arines and seige "t"anks, C&C resorts to using sequential funcion keys and Ctrl+A,B,C,D or E,R,T,Y,U. I remember when first learning Warcraft II, I caught on to the Blizzard style hotkeys almost immediately, but after playing over 40 hours of C&C3, its become clear that the C&C system simply isn't that intuitive.

Unit Design: 6/10

Tiberium Wars has few innovations from previous titles. While the rest of the RTS world has largely departed from mirrored races, Tiberium Wars races have largely similar tech trees and unit classes. Hell, even C&C Generals had better differentiation. Yes, there are very unique units such as Shadow Teams, Stealth Tanks, Masterminds, Juggernauts but they are merely supplemental units as the backbone units of any army are really identical amongst the 3 factions.

Each race begin with a partly mobile construction building. Then they have identical power plants (with identical upgrades). Then there's the Barracks, each race has an infantry-vs-infantry unit, an infantry-vs vehicle unit, and an engineer (not going to complain here, engineers are a pretty cool concept). Then after the rax there's the factory for vehicles. Each race has an anti vehicle, air, and infantry vehicle. Air units are pretty well differentiated, so no complaint there. Then there are the base defenses: everybody's got one each: antir air, vehicle, and infantry plus one super-defense structure. Finally, everybody's got pretty much identical base-crushing superweapons (nukes, ion cannons, rifts) with a 7 minute timer.

The one saving grace of differentiation is the sidebar tactical abilities. Each faction has abilities that can be deployed anywhere on the field at the click of a button. These vary a great deal from paratroopers, to worm-hole portals, to spawning repair droids, to cloaking a cluster of units to EMP blasts. Sadly these cool abilities have very long timers and are used rather infrequently.

Strategic Depth: 7.5/10

Strategic depth was never a strength in the C&C series. Like other C&C games, Tiberium Wars is centered around the contrived weapon-type vs unit-type system. Units are either infantry, vehicle, aircraft, or structure, and each unit has weapons designated to damage one or two unit types. While a similar system exist in almost any other RTS game (especially the attack-type vs armor-type system in Warcraft III), none are as pronounced as in C&C. If your APC says "strong vs infantry", then you better shoot nothing but infantry with it. Because this thing can literally sit there and unload an impossible number of bullets at a vehicle or building and still not kill it. Similarly, a Mammoth tank that was smashing buildings to bits just a moment ago can't even hold its ground against a much cheaper squad of heavy infantry. All of this makes you feel like you're playing a very elaborate game of rock-paper-scissors.

Unique and tricky strategies do exist: the other day I saw a replay where a Scrin player uses a Mastermind to control an enemy refinery, therefor gaining ground control of the area and immediately popping a storm column in the enemy base. I imagine as the gamers mature more of these cool moves will appear.

Lack of micro is another serious problem. A majority of the units in this game move VERY slowly, meaning you'll never see RTS wonders like Slayer_Boxer killing lurkers with dancing marines (for those who don't know, lurkers are suppose to counter marines). Few units can move fast enough to dodge fire or pull off anything slick. The micro mostly involves getting a good initial formation and pulling back heavily damaged units while focus firing on the enemy's weakest units.

I'm now going to slam a long-standing tradition of C&C: The building system. Pre-building and popping them from underground may seem cool in the old days, but it really erodes strategic depth. First of all, in-progress buildings are completely non-existent in the battle field, meaning opponents cannot scout them, and pre-empt tech-tree advances. Second of all, players cannot try to attack in-progress buildings to force their opponent to cancel construction. This is the single biggest reason why scouting seems to have less emphasis in C&C than in other RTS games (hell, C&C didn't even have fog of war until this title, shame shame)

Finally, I think that C&C lacks transparency on how units work strategically. The interface NEVER tells you the HP and damage power of the units. You are left to trial-and-error your way through which units are effective in what encounter. While this is not a problem for veteran players, it unnecessarily lengthens the learning curve.

Overall: 7

Tiberium Wars is a beautiful game set in a really cool universe. Sadly, poor storytelling and gameplay prevent the title from being a memorable addition to the RTS genre. Hardcore C&C fans will welcome the traditional C&C characteristics after a long hiatus, but outside RTS players will find that C&C tradition really only gets in the way of making a great game. Don't expect Korean TV to be broadcasting games of C&C3 anytime soon.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 04/19/07