C&C only by name.
Here I am sitting before you, trying to come up with all sorts of strange and fitting analogies to try and convey just how much I couldn't believe my eyes and ears when I first played C&C4. If my eyes could puke, they would.
So after the abysmally bad Red Alert 3, EA developers probably sat down to discuss how they can improve on the mishaps of the last game. And as in true EA tradition, some higher up bloke would swat off most of the truly innovative ideas in favor of appealing to a bigger crowd. The wise developers probably have long left this company, but the invading force of retards that now populates the EA studios decided that indeed, too much complexity in a strategy game is a bad idea. So why not strip the entire ****ing base building routine completely. You know, the core aspect of every RTS ever made?
"Why yes, that would be a great idea" replied the developer's mate. "we can give up that stupid base building idea so we could easily market this game to the console players".
"What about resource harvesting?" asked the first guy, to which his mate replied "loose that too, its too much for the console player's short attention span to handle. It will blow their brains out"
"So if there is no resource harvesting or base building, then how will matches be determined?"
"We will make a WarHammer 40k rip-off of territory control. But you know how in WarHammer 40k you could build lots of units and have control over several nodes at the same time, well we should do the exact opposite of that and let the player control as little units as possible and have only one or two nodes worth capturing in every multi-player map.
Sounds like a winning formula, doesn't it?
Lets get down to the more technical problems. Even from the starting campaign, you aren't given a choice to choose a side in the conflict until only after the second mission. So choosing a side right off the bat is impossible. Sounds like fun, doesn't it? having to play the first two missions again if you want to switch sides? I know there are checkpoints and auto saves, but having the ability to just click once to choose a different side is not too much to ask for, but now we have to reload an old save to do so. This might seem like a petty complaint, but small complaints lead to big problems. By that I mean the poorly acted and contrived storyline that would make your ears bleed. EA makes the same mistake they did with Dead Space by asking us to care for characters we don't know, or just met. It seems they cannot grasp what it is that makes people attached to certain characters. You can't just tell us to care about someone by tacking on an arbitrary tragedy on him or by just saying so, you have to characterize them first. Your wife is particularly guilty of this bull**** as she is a poorly defined character that makes an appearance for a few brief moments at the start of storyline, and we never get to see her again. And thank **** for that. She is one of the worst actors I have ever seen. In fact, most of the actors are downright obnoxious in their performance. The only decent actor around is of course Joseph D.Kucan who plays Kane, whom I very much adore.
I know that the series was always known for it's average acting and B movie presentation, low budget sets and a simple plot, but C&C4 is aesthetically clean and good looking , with terrible acting and a plot that makes little to no sense. Personally, I was so confused with the plot that I just stopped caring after the first cinematic. Since when does Kane ever try to trifle with the enemy? doesn't that oppose the whole concept of having this game in the first place if there is no conflict? so of course the outcome of this so called "meeting" between Kane and the UN apparently, is already foreseen even before he walks into the room. Then two missions later you are presented with the option of switching to NoD side of the conflict.
Now hold on a minute. Since when do generals in a certain country's army suddenly switch their loyalties because some guy came up and told them to do so? to be honest, I couldn't care less about the plot at this point. Anything to get away from the horrid actors on GDI side and seeing more of Joe Kucan is all I wanted. Also, for all the effort EA has put into the making the game as user (i.e console gamer) friendly game, they forgot to explain the plot properly to new players.
The game play map is something I can ***** about as well. The camera is zoomed in too much and you can't do a damn thing about it. Since when do we in this day and age have an unmodifiable camera positioning in an RTS? this is absurd.
Combat is another thing that sticks out like a sore thumb. The units are stiff and unreal. They are hard to control and have such enormous delay between attacks, it makes you fall asleep. I couldn't believe how long it takes an army of tanks to destroy just one foot soldier. This is the direct opposite of RA3's combat that went fast as lightning but ultimately lacked any substance. Also, C&C4's large array of units is wasted on the fact that you are given a massive restriction to your maximum unit capacity. That's right, there is a unit cap that is so low, that you can only control a few units at a time. Who's bright idea was this?! Even if you are going to cap us on units, at least have the decency of making it a high number, not 3 foot soldiers and 3 tanks. In all fairness you can expand it to greater numbers by capturing specific outposts on the maps, but even the maximum I got out of this was a measly army that doesn't even come anywhere near what you could do in previous games.
EA has decided that being able to build all your tech at once is too complicated, so at the start of each mission you choose which role you want to play. There is a total of three - Defensive, Offencive, and Support. Defensive for building some turrets (yes you can actually build some defense turrets), Offense is for building tanks, and Support for building Aircraft. So essentially you can only have one crawler (A poor man's excuse for a construction yard) that can perform just one of the above roles. So take your pick. You can switch to a different role, but that requires to demolish your crawler and then after ten seconds or so, call in for a new one. Oh yes, a crawler could die as many times as you want, as long as you have some active units on the field, the game won't be over. So basically, you might as well just leave the base unguarded since it has no strategic significance. Thus throwing what little strategy this game might have had, out of the window.
There is absolutely nothing you can do to cripple your opponent. There aren't any harvesters to destroy, no power-plants to blast, and no economy at all. The units don't even cost any resources, so you can just spam them until you reach the unit cap. Also, for a game based on the twilight of the Tiberium harvesting saga, there is no Tiberium to be seen. You're making a game about Tiberium WITH NO BLOODY TIBERIUM. It's like making a Star Wars movie with no Jedi. It boggles my mind just how stupid could these people possibly be.
Also, I can't believe that Frank Klepacki's trade mark music is nowhere to be seen. How is that possible? Every game in the franchise was enchanted by Frank's superior rock/metal music that we learned to love so much. My guess is that he realized that the series has become **** and decided to bail out, before his name would be stagnated by this awful piece of crud.
To top it all off, the draconic Ubisoft DRM is back. I swear, this thing is more deadly than the Ebola virus. It destroys what little fun you may have had from this shallow mess of a game, by demanding a constant connection to the EA server even when playing single player. But if your connection falters for any reason, your saves would be lost. Joy.
One last complaint that I have to mention is the campaign's difficulty. This game isn't hard, instead it's supremely annoying. It becomes difficult for all the wrong reasons. You are capped with so little of an army and are pitted against 5 times as many troops as you can possibly produce, just to stop you from reaching your goal, which in some later missions is to escort, or destroy a slowly moving target while there are dozens of other crawlers spewing units like an automated ice machine. This game becomes harder not because it's challenging, but because of the developers exploiting the limitations of this game. It becomes a frustration and a battle of willpower to persist in playing this abomination, to the point when I gave up completely at around the 7th mission into NOD's campaign.
I also heard not long ago that pirates were debating whether to crack this game or not. This game is so bad that people don't even want to pirate it. That's when you know this game is the mother turd.
See, the ultimate irony of this game is that for it's effort to appeal to a bigger crowd, it changed so much that it no longer is a C&C game. In doing so, it failed to appeal to it's fan base which is essentially what the series was being made for, in the first place.
RIP Command & Conquer.
God, I miss Westwood.