Monday, February 22, 2010

C&C 4: The Beta

Change...it can be good, it can be bad. Command and Conquer as a whole has always stayed to the tried and true classic RTS style, well as a conclusion to the tiberium universe C&C4 decided to change things up.

Lets start with some backstory, command and conquer(excluding Renegade) has been the mold for RTS games sense RTS games were created, being the first big hit following up Westwood's introduction of the RTS genre with Dune II C&C 1 was a basic model for all RTS games to come. Three major ideas: manage your base, manage your economy, and manage your troops; whoever did this best would win.

Command and Conquer takes those three ideas and simplifies them in an attempt to widen the market for RTS games which have traditionally had rather steep learning curves. Your whole base is condensed into Mobile Construction Vehicle(MCV) or a Crawler. From this you can build units, defenses, structures, and call for support depending on your class. The game lets you choose if you want to play offence, with powerful land based vehicles; defense, with turrets backed by swarms of infantry and artillery; or support, with aircraft back by support powers.
Your crawler can move across the map and deploy to let out any units it's built and create a repair field.

In order to improve past the beginning or tier I units and defenses you must gather Tiberium at centralized nodes and return it to your deploy zone. Unlike previous iterations of C&C any unit can pick up the tiberium and all players on the team benefit from it. Rather than defending harvesters it becomes a capture the flag game. Speaking of ctf to win now rather than destroy the enemy you gain victory points and the first team to 2500 wins. There are two ways to do this, kill enemy units or control more VP nodes than the enemy netting you a steady stream of points.

The game is very different from standard C&C and that's kind of disappointing however it has it's own fair share of enjoyment.

RANT ABOUT LEVELS(pure opinion)
EA, in their stupidity said "hey, look at that really popular game CoD:MW, lets steal their ideas and put it into our game! Oh wait it's an RTS not an FPS, w/e" They added a system where you level up and unlock more units and tech the more you play. This means that at lvl 1 when you forst get the game you only have 4 units and one research available on each crawler until you play enough games. So if you pit a lvl 1 vs a lvl 20 there is about an 80% chance the lvl 20 will win! Great job EA!

Pros: fun, easy to play, more lenient with mistakes than other RTSs, some really fun unit mechanics.

Cons: level system, bad matchmaking, unbalanced(i know, what should I expect from a beta), terrible community, lack of game diversity(1 game is just like the next)

Blah, should have written more but I'm too lazy

1 comment:

  1. Wow, that level up system just sounds dumb. I always hated that system really, even if the game applies. I like it better if I have to play for extras, and not game-defining weapons/essentials.

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