Command & Conquer

THE BAD:
Quite easy

SUMMARY:
One of my dad’s friends let us borrow this game and we soon became very addicted to it and highly enjoyed the game. There are two sides, Global Defense Initiative (shortened to GDI) and the Brotherhood of Nod (shortened to Nod). The GDI play in yellow and Nod play in grey with red buildings. Nod is trying to take over the world and it’s up to the GDI to stop them. Before each mission you are usually confronted by either a video of someone giving you orders or some Intel. These cut-scenes are very well done and scripted and you can see the stress on the faces of the people in the videos as you get nearer the end of your campaign and the pressure mounts to get the job done.

To build up a base you start off with a Mobile Construction Vehicle (MCV) which you deploy. Then you build a power plant and other options will open up to you. Power is crucial because if your power goes below the amount that is required then your Radar will shut down, everything will build much slower, your more powerful base defences will go offline and your base will come almost to a grinding halt. Protecting your power plants is important because you are vulnerable to attack during a power outage.

I was only about 9 when I first played this game and thinking back it flowed extremely smoothly. Everything you did was for a purpose and the storyline was good and had depth. It didn’t seem like you were doing things just because the designers had run out of ideas. When you did a mission you were taken to a screen which showed a map of the whole terrain your were fighting on. You had to choose where you were going next. Quite often there was only one choice but sometimes you had a choice of two or three maps quite often with different objectives and units. As you progress through the game the technology gets more advanced and you gain access to bigger and better units and buildings.

This game does contain one of the best missions I’ve ever done though. The sixth mission for GDI starts off with you getting a video message to do something, but the transmission is jumbled up and sketchy in places and you miss a couple of key points. When you start the mission you control a Commando, a very powerful anti-infantry unit who can kill any infantry unit in one shot from a long range. He is extremely weak against tanks and vehicles though, so keep him clear of that. But he can level buildings by going in them and placing C4 in them, which will blow it up in under a second. All you know is that you have to destroy a building, but which one it is gets lost in the transmission. When I got to the base I thought logically about strengths and weaknesses and you can guess which building you need to destroy just from reading this review. I got the mission done first time, but I felt it was one of the best thought out missions I’d ever seen.

Both sides have advantages and disadvantages. For GDI you will eventually gain access to the most powerful tank in the game, the Mammoth Tank. This is a massive gun with two barrels and rockets to combat air units. When damaged it can also regenerate its health up to half way. Trying to take out several of these is extremely hard as one on one they can take out Nod’s Gun Turret, its primary defensive structure. GDI also has the Ion Cannon. When you build an Advanced Communications Centre you will get access to this. It fires a fairly small, but concentrated, blast down anywhere on the field. This is most useful for taking out a defensive structure as it only occupies one square. Without a doubt Nod’s most powerful weapon is the Obelisk of Light. It’s a defensive structure which fires a powerful red laser beam at any ground unit. It can take out a Mammoth Tank in just 3 hits if I remember rightly and has a fast rate of fire for something so powerful. But this takes up a lot of power and if you go under-powered the Obelisks will go offline. Nod also has a Stealth Tank which is invisible to enemies and only gets revealed when it passes by infantry or a defensive structure. Using these to explore maps is very handy. To counter GDI’s Ion Cannon they have the Temple of Nod. From here you can launch a Nuclear Missile which causes massive devastation to the target. Due to its massive power you can only use it once in single player mode, and it takes a long time to recharge in multiplayer mode. One unit both sides have is the Engineer. This unit can capture most buildings (except defensive ones) and they then become yours. If you capture an enemies MCV then in general that will severely handicap them unless they’ve got the technology to build another one. But even if they can it will cost them 5000 credits, a worthy way to spend 500 credits on an Engineer.

To get money you need to build a Refinery. With this you get a Harvester which goes and collects up a substance called Tiberium. When the Harvester picks up some it comes back to drop it off at the Refinery and you get 700 credits for a full load. Using more than one Harvester gets you credits quicker. The Refinery can hold 200 credits but after that any more Tiberium that’s brought in just gets lost. You need to build either another Refinery or Silos. A Silo can hold 1500 credits, but are weak structures and need to be protected. Tiberium is a poisonous substance and any infantry that walk over it will lose health and eventually die, so be wary of that.

There is an option for multiplayer but it is pretty weak, although this game is several years old now. The map you can do can only have a maximum of 4 players and any computer players don’t do that much. All in all the battles never last that long, but there are much better games around now for multiplayer battles. This game is more concentrated on the single player aspect and does a very good job of it. The storyline is good, fits together well and the only criticism I can think of the game is that it is fairly easy at points and is only hard because the enemy has a base when you have to start one off anew. It isn’t easy by any means, but it could have been harder. Having said all that, this was the game that got me into strategy and war games like this and this is a very well done game.