Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

100 or More Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Revolutionary"

This classic RTS vastly improved the concept introduced by Westwood's earlier title Dune II: Battle for Arrakis. Command & Conquer follows the fictional story based in modern times (1995) of a war between the Global Defence Initiative (GDI). A coalition of nations working together to uphold peace and security, from a multinational terrorist organisation known as the Brotherhood of Nod (NOD for short).

There is no real introduction to the game. You start by receiving two distorted messages from the two factions and you choose which one you want to connect to. Both have short introductions and throw you straight in to the fight and if you want to know whats happening your just going to have to complete more missions. The game goes on to reveal a complex battle over the control of a dangerous but valuable alien substance known as 'Tiberium' which suck the life from the soil to reproduce it's self which it has done at an alarming rate spreading to most of the world.

NOD which controls over half of the worlds harvesting operations of Tiberium use this to fund their war against the GDI making them go from a terrorist organisation to a military super power and the result is world war 3.

Command & Conquer is a much easier game to grasp compared to other RTS games released around the same time and the game play is very fluent. You get money by harvesting the Tiberium and returning it to the refinery to be converted in to credits, simple enough but as you get further in to the game their is less tiberium in the stages or you have to expand and protect harvesting operations which add a degree of difficulty.

While at the start of the game infantry play a big role later they become useless forcing you to rely on the tank rush tactic which is difficult because to build a decent size force uses most of the tiberium the stage has to offer. There is one infantry unit that is useful the whole way through the game and thats the engineer. While weak and un-armed this unit is able to capture enemy structures instantly, provided you can get him in. Which then you can sell the building for more then you paid for the engineer.

There is one glitch/cheat you can utilise and thats the sandbag wall. I stumble across this at a very young age and it helped me finish the game but later in life I choose to finish it properly which is a challenge. You build sandbags from you base to the enemies (which is cheap) then build a wall across the entrance of their base. The AI is to stupid to destroy the wall and are trapped in their base giving you the entire map to harvest freely. Another glitch is you can also build structures from the link the sandbags make with you base so you continue to the back of the base block them off build a barracks and spit out the engineers taking their buildings and then use their own units against them. But like i said this makes the game way to easy.

I'm sure most people have played Command & Conquer by now and know that it is truly a masterpiece. With visuals and sound track that was incredible for it's time it set the standard for RTS games and in my opinion the best in the Command & Conquer Series