The Best extrava-grandisticaly-magestic C&C game ever... or is it?
User Rating: 8 | Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars PC
Mixed reactions! All I can and should say. But this is a review so let’s get down to the nitty gritty. As we all know C&C is an awesome universe with 7 games up to date (not counting expansions.) Then came C&C 3 from every gamers fan: EA! The Good: Live action cut-scenes, a really nice overall design of units, sound effects are even awesome-er, the in-game music is very nice and extremely entertaining, the ability to construct buildings without builders. Wasn’t that a short list? Oh yea and a New race. The bad: EA's constant not-giving-a-damn-about-fans attitude. Well this game shouldn’t be out. I’ve been having a few problems with my C&c3 so I made some investigations: it turns out that the game has more bugs than an ant farm: video sync problems, game crashing, units blocking, uninstaller crashing (you read right), patch-er problems etc (bigger list than The Good). Now a few of these bugs were very present in the demo and EA made great vows promising to fix them. Bull crap. Retail version here and here they still are (even funnier: the patches that are suppose to fix these problems don’t do nothing either). Now my opinion is that this game is the most imbalanced balanced game ever. Let me explain: The GDI are clearly the slow strong and powerful; the NOD are fast low-health sneaky SOBies and the Scrin are coming at you with a good equilibrium of things. All’s well and good on the outside, but when you truly play the game you notice a few things: GDI unit cost is way over the top, giving the Nod and Screen much bigger number advantage. This is very well hidden as most people play against AI first and AI is not as good as your neighbor. In multiplayer the GDI become absolute losers. Secondly this game (again in multiplayer because people tend to evolve opposite to an AI witch will not) is strictly an air game. The air defenses suck. All 3 races have air defense capabilities but that does not mean that they do any good. A squadron of let’s say 70 Nod venoms (don’t think that that is much because venoms are quite cheap in this game) will wipe the map clean. 70 venoms cost 700 x 70= 49000. With 49000 you can only get 18 mammoths. Trust me when I say that the mammoths won’t win (to little air damage and to slow movement). Scrins have the best air defense (the cripple amongst the paralyzed). Here’s one of my favorite bugs: Snipers. The GDI Sniper has a huge range and detects invisible units, but he doesn’t shoot unless given the order too. Now since Snipers are invisible you might think that is logical. Considering that there’s a hold fire command it isn’t. Now I won’t waste even more of your time enumerating the hundreds of bugs I discovered (units blocking: one of the reinforcement plains got shot on top of the NOD base but it did not die; it just hovered there giving me a clean view of what was going on inside the NOD base. computer rebooting, crashing etc). Instead I will explain my reasonable high mark for such a letdown: It single player it allows a gamer to fully use the entire arsenal of a nation and gives you (only in this situation) a feeling of strategy and fun. It’s relaxing, it’s easy to learn, it has really nice effects, and it has Nuke missiles, Ion cannons and the Scrin Super weapon (play the game and find out); it adds an interesting story to the C&C world, it has religious fanatics, United nation troops and Aliens (The Scrin are one of the coolest looking alien races in a while). I am sorry if I left out a few things that ought to have been said, but I believe that a C&C game should truly be great (the rest of them were, this one is not). It should have everything (except bugs of this magnitude): graphics, sound, game-play in single and multiplayer, fights to the death, balanced races giving the win to the better tactician not the better race. Hopefully, in time, patches (that actually work) will bring the game to a status that is SHOULD but doesn’t have. P.S. I am shocked at the EA kiss-ass review Gamespot did
