Hey all,
First off lets introduce myself, I am known in the gaming world as AgentBLUE. I play a whole variety of games, including MMO's (WoW, Maple Story, Allods.... and most likely too many others to remember) There's FPS games like Call Of Duty, Battlefield's and pretty much anything else that tickles my fancy.
But all this aside, I will be bringing you the first game Review for Mouse and Keyboard. The game I'm reviewing today is Command and Conquer 4 - Tiberian Twilight. Now the first thing you see, like all other CC games is the intro video. It is great to see that they have kept the feel of the videos the same, CGI scenes of the in-game vehicles from both factions, the GDI and the NOD are shown off. later though the scenes are played by live actors, A trait that is passed on throughout all the CC games.Ok, I started playing the solo campaign and it feels almost identical to the rest of the CC games. Pretty much from the first keystroke you can tell the storyline is going to be the same as all of its preprocessors; bad guys want to blow stuff up, good guys have to stop bad guys. Now I'm not saying that's a bad thing, this plot is a tried and true basis for any plot. A positive for the plot was found about three or four missions into the campaign where you are able to follow the path of the GDI officer or go with the NOD leader, just something that hit me as new. But in all honesty it felt like this story line was going to throw me down the same path as all of the other CC games.
Now, where the plot was lacking in some thickness and some good gooey story line, the actual game play mechanics made up for. The original style of CC was a simple five step procedure.
1. Build big base
2. Forget defence
3. Build a hulking army of all the same unit (maybe a medic guy just for good measure)
4. Send said hulking army to destroy everything in its way
5. Sit back with a coffee
But with CC4 I found this isn't the case, your Command Centre is mobile. So you're constantly building units on the fly while your command centre strolls along. Once you place the centre down all units completed come out in a single file, not like some cartoon of twenty people getting stuck in a door frame. Now this style of play is odd, and does take some time to get used too at first. But trust me, I learnt the hard way in skirmish maps, This mechanic allows you to really get immersed into the game because it's more interactive than throwing thirty units around a map.
The graphics of the game are quite similar to CC 3, it boasts quite a lot detail without ripping my hardware computer a new one. The land scapes are quite nice with all the extra details in them, trees, buildings, explosion sites and other various little nooks and crannies. The units have a nice bit of detail to them, instead of looking like blocks running around with a machine gun. When I zoom into the units to have a better look they almost have a cell shaded quality too them but not overly cartoony.A big negative for me is the unlock system they have introduced into the game, it was either going to make my gaming experience awesome or turn it in to a grind the game. After a short while, the whole experience turned in to a grind. What this system is, is something we've seen in a lot of newer games; you get XP for playing games, you level up, you unlock more units/upgrades/structures. And doing this turned the game in to quite a tedious and boring experience. just sitting there blowing other units up for XP to unlock some extra swag quickly turned a once a fantastic RTS game in to some sort of semi-mmo grind. all up i managed to get to level three, considering this took me about five to ten games to get level three i was fairly fed up with the system. But, i will persevere, i believe the games level cap is twenty which of course comes with some cool perks.
So overall, it isn't a terrible game, especially for it being $17.49 USD right now instead of $69 USD on steam. I'm not 100% on when the sale ends so if you wanted it cheaply, act now. The game play and new and old features of this series have kept it going nicely but the new levelling system has taken a massive chunk out of the fun factor of this game. It's not an absolute disaster of a game, nor is it fantastic, more something to kill a few hours here and there when we're bored.
-AgentBLUE
