#COMMAND AND CONQUER 4 FULL#

I'd guess that this is to preserve the sanctity of the unlocks by storing your status server-side, but it also means that even if you want to skirmish or play the campaign, you'll need to be connected.

The XP system also comes at the cost of requiring an Internet connection at all times. Normally, the response would be to say 'well, just play against people of your level.' But the game doesn't seem to be great at automatically matching players up that way. This is unfortunate, in a way, because low-level players aren't going to have access to the more useful tactics until they earn enough experience points to even the playing field. The game has a persistent progression system that works across all modes, and as you level up, you'll unlock additional units and upgrades that make you more effective in battle. Of course, it's not hard to see that the game's multiplayer is probably where the developers hope you spend most of your time.

#COMMAND AND CONQUER 4 FULL#

Overall, it's full of characters you won't care about double-crossing each other in ways that barely matter. Joe Kucan continues to be the high point as the charismatic villain, Kane, but even his role feels pointless in the grand scheme of things. Previously, the sequences were bad in a campy and fun way, often with a little stunt casting to sweeten the pot. Though attempts were made to make the franchise's signature video sequences a bit better and more serious, the story falls flat from start to finish. The campaign is meant to tie up the current story arc, which has Kane and the Brotherhood of Nod sort of making peace with GDI in a last-ditch attempt to save the planet, which is being overrun and contaminated by tiberium, the same crystal-based form of energy that kicked off this entire war to begin with. The maps are small, which keeps things moving at a decent pace. The energy refills on its own and lets you sort of hang back and still make an impact on the battle. Support gets the air-based units and an energy meter that allows you to cast support powers, like airstrikes or a healing radius. This means the defensive crawler has a build radius and also has a power limit, which is sort of like the command point limit for units, but instead prevents you from just creating a zillion turrets all over the map. Defense gets infantry units and defensive structures, like bunkers and turrets. The offense class gets the heavy ground-based vehicles and plays fairly straightforwardly. The game's three classes play a bit differently and offer different units. There's a cap on respawns in campaign games to give you an eventual way to fail. Instead, you can spawn a new crawler and keep going. And if your crawler gets blown away in a fight, the game doesn't end. Units build out of your crawler, a class-based structure that you can pick up and walk around the map at will, allowing you to set up camp anywhere you like, for as long as you like. The major limiting factor is a command points cap, and most units take three or six points to spawn. In most games, you'll be limited to somewhere between 10 and 30-ish units at any given time. Rather than turtling up and building an elaborate base, or immediately feeling the brunt of an early game rush, C&C4 works on a much smaller scale. The disappointing part about all this is that the changes made to the franchise sound like a good idea. When placed together with a lackluster campaign and a persistent online progression system that means you won't be able to see the game's best units until you've invested way more time into the game than it deserves, Tiberian Twilight feels like it was designed to kill interest in the Command & Conquer franchise. By stripping away some of the more complex elements of resource-gathering and other staples of the real-time strategy genre, C&C4 makes individual units feel almost entirely meaningless, leaving you little reason to actually strategize your way through its campaign, since you can just pump out more units as your existing ones get taken down without penalty.

For all the changes that Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight makes to the once-unbeatable C&C formula, it's surprising that the largest issue is that the game feels monotonous and tiresome right out of the box. You're usually faced with a decision between a lot of low-end units or a few high-end ones.

Command and conquer 4