English
Gamereactor
reviews
Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight

Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight

Command & Conquer fans, get ready to have your worldview shaken. Kane is about to say good bye and will bring the old ways with him as he leaves...

Subscribe to our newsletter here!

* Required field
HQ

It's the year 2062 and within six years the whole Earth is expected to be completely uninhabitable. The alien Tiberium crystals, that crashed into our planet in the mid-90s, have evolved over the centuries and soon they will cover the entire surface. The surface of a planet that now can can be divided into various colorful danger zones - labeled either "deadly" or "more deadly". The world is in crisis, to say the least, so in order to resolve the situation a temporary alliance between the early eternal enemies GDI and NOD has been forged. Together they are not only faced with the Tiberium threat and different extremist groups, but also the threat from within themselves.

Command & Conquer wasn't first. Some insist that the first game in the series created the strategy genre. That's far from the truth. What the game did however, was to make the genre much more popular. Simply by being the best. Command & Conquer has always been a strategy game series with a major focus on strategy. It may seem like an obscure point to make, but where other games in the genre simply is about spamming your best units as fast as possible, Command & Conquer is considerably more complex.

The units and the strategies here are instead a delicate clockwork of plus, minus, rock, paper and scissors. This fourth installment in the series is of course the same, but with a newly installed capacity limit on the number of units. Which makes it more important than ever to plan ahead so you can get all your pieces right. You can count on that your opponent has a sometimes disgustingly well-tuned AI that is really good at finding cracks in your armor, and that is hardly reluctant or ashamed to abuse them as much as possible.

In Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight this familiar gameplay makes its comeback, while also bringing a lot of new stuff with it. It's not often you see a game this retro-nostalgic that also looks this much to the future. They deliberately kitschy full motion video cutscenes are back, with Joe Kucan once again in the role as Kane. The character Kane has become an icon in the world of gaming, to say the least, even though a lot of people don't even know who he is. The sociopath with the hard eyes and the Anton LaVeyian goatee has always been a figurehead for the series, a role he reprises here.

This is an ad:

Yet, the game is far from nostalgic; EA Los Angeles has completely re-written Westwood's old rulebook. Which they then burned.

The basic premise - build infantry, tanks and aircraft to defeat your opponent - is of course still there. On the other hand, say good bye to the classic resource gathering and hello to the new mobile bases. At the start of every match you get to choose between three different styles of play that all come with their own particular advantages and disadvantages; offensive, defensive or support.

Offensive aims to kill everything, using specially designed devices, before anything has a chance to kill you. The defensive style roots itself in one place, then focuses on building up a defense of bunkers and security around its base, not unlike you'd often to do in classic strategy games. Finally, the support style is a mix between the two and provides various support abilities, like calling in air strikes.

From there you build your army according to a "less is more"-principle around a base which is mostly mobile and that follows you around like a majestic metallic hippo. You can see the influence from other games in every gunfight, with Dawn of War II probably being the most important. It's a bold move by EA Los Angeles, and most of the time it works out great. Of course, it's not without a bit of confused ambivalence and a certain chafing of my more conservative genes. What is more unfortunate is that a lot of the content found in previous games has been scrapped, and only having two playable factions feels like the heaviest loss.

This is an ad:

Otherwise, it's business as usual. The matches are intense, and those who know all the hot keys and can list them backwards (in Russian, while sleeping) will be rewarded. The campaign is split between GDI and NOD, with hours of material for both sides. For a second time in the series you can actually play in co-op, which certainly should be applauded. Then there's of course a refined multiplayer mode, in which true fans of the series can spend an infinite amount of time. The whole idea behind Tiberian Twilight is that the game is supposed to be in a constant online mode, with the multiplayer lobby available at all times. It doesn't matter if you're enjoying a calm round of Skirmish, or playing through the campaign; the next online game should never be further away than a simple mouse click.

The ultra-futurism advocated by the game's design is sadly not very great, it's also prone to inducing motion sickness. At times it's hard to discern if there's a war or a laser disco going on, with the maps filled with neon-robots fighting each other. I know that Command & Conquer loves melted cheese, and that it is deliberately camp at times, but does that need to influence more than the cutscenes? Despite the high quality of the graphics, it can make the game look a bit cheap at times.

Musically, the Command & Conquer series has always been great and made an important point by releasing the soundtracks in connection with its games. Tiberian Twilight primarily carries the legacy of the first couple of games, with choirs and orchestras so epic that your auditory canals are in danger of collapsing. It's so Wagnerian that it's hard not to laugh, either with it or at it.

Once you have contorted your way past the learning curve and accepted its innovations, Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight is one of the most exciting strategy games in a long time. Although it's been scaled back to only include the GDI and NOD, the three different play styles open up for a lot of variety. It's also nice to see a strategy game so black and white, evil versus good.

It's a Command & Conquer that has shed its old skin and turned into a fresher, tighter and funnier self. Although it is with a certain sadness that I say good bye to Kane and the old ways, it's also with a certain pleasure that I open my arms to embrace the future.

Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian TwilightCommand & Conquer 4: Tiberian TwilightCommand & Conquer 4: Tiberian TwilightCommand & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight
08 Gamereactor UK
8 / 10
+
Innovative game design, long campaign, great multiplayer
-
Tasteless design, the Scrins are missing
overall score
is our network score. What's yours? The network score is the average of every country's score

Related texts



Loading next content