Kane is Real Pt. 3: The Geeky Stuff! is Good but not Great

To understand this post, you need to be familiar with Command and Conquer. (A major dialect of Geekspeak) Otherwise don't waste your time. Yes Nushka, you bugger off. There are no 4 letter words in this. =P

OK so all the hype about my surprise at unknowingly finding myself at the UK launch event. But the more important question is. How is the damn game?

GET IT ONLY FOR THE MULTIPLAYER.

The real 4th Tiberium War is found not in the Campaign but in the hundreds of online matches raging across EA's servers between CNC fans.

OK. I'm aware of all the bashing I've given the game until now. And all that critisicm still holds true - for the the Single Player Campaing. the CNC franchise, 15 years in the running, c'mon man, this finale has to blow us away!

But it doesn't. The Campaign has the weakest story ever of any CNC game. this is no 4th Tiberium War. It's a personal spat between a Kane who wants to 'ascend' to the Scrin heavens on top the Scrin towers, and a psychopathic GDI commander has a personal score to settle with Kane. The endings is horribly weak and disappointing, and explains nothing. Kane ascends. That's it. Was that a spoiler? No. Cause it wasn't even anything good worth spoiling to begin with. No more are the grand strategic battles you used to fight over the first three Tiberium Wars. It's all personal now. And except for 3 to 4 missions that are truly memorable, the rest of them I forgot as soon as the mission was over. Oh, and you have a whiny wife now. Yes. In the single player campaign. You have a wife. She is always crying. Now you know this is just bad cinema. EA you have let us down with C&C4.

But the multiplayer is a different story. If you don't know by now, the biggest changes of CNC4 are NO tiberium harvesting, NO base building, and imposition of a population cap. What this means is no more bases to macromanage, and a limited number of units to control. You know what this has done? It has made the multiplayer more accessible to the general public!

I am one of those casual gamers who could not keep up with the highly competitive environment of previous CNC games, and so I usually stayed away from CNC multiplayer. The best were really good. They memorized build orders, and were able to maco and micro manage between controlling units, building buildings, and harvesting. I'll admit, I was not good at doing so in the fast paced blink of an eye speed of multiplayer. But now, all I have to do, is build units instantaneously until they reach the pop cap, and attack. No problem if units die, build them again. For Free! And they also build while your MCV is on the move, and they come out when you deploy it. So yes folks, I like the fact that CNC4 has been dumbed down. Now dummy like me can take on pros like you beetch.

Also, each faction NOD and GDI is now divided into 3 subfactions: Offense, Defense, and Support. Each subfaction has its own units. So all in all there are actually 6 distinct armies. And to gain the best units, you have to level up till level 20. Yup, like an RPG. And it is this facet of the game that initially made me dabble with the multiplayer because once I finished the campaign, I was only at lvl 10, and I wanted to unlock all the other more powerful units. And this was where I became hooked to the multiplayer. Trust me when I say, I'm not multiplayer expert, and CNC4 is very accessible to the casual gamer. A match is no longer won by destroying all of the enemies' buildings, but by capturing Control Nodes, killing enemy units, etc. in which you accumulate points. First team to do so wins. Yup, something like FPS games of Battlefield and Modern Warfare. Doesn't matter if you lose your MCV, you just get a new one! And even though you lose the match, you still get to keep the experience points your team earned, so this gives you the incentive to keep on fighting even though you know the battle is lost. Cause those experience points will still help you level up!

All the stuff to unlock for NOD offense class.

VERDICT
If you've been looking at CNC4 reviews on other sites, you can see the wide discrepancy between official site ratings and fan ratings. Fan ratings are all at 1.0 or close to zero, whereas official site ratings have given CNC4 and average of 7.0 out of 10. This is because all fans have been judging it on the single player campaign which absolutely sucks, and the new play style of no bases just doesnt suit it. So this is a terrible game to be given the name CNC4. But judged on its own, this game is good and fun system for multiplayer. This is what official sites have done in rating this game.

For me, I say the same. Single player absolute bollocks. But I can tell that I will be playing the multiplayer for a long time to come. I had got the game free, but having known this, if would buy the game if I had to.

NOD defense class. See the difference? Defence can build a few buildings! (mostly turrets)

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
Expansion pack of course. I'm pretty sure that the expansion pack can do no worse than CNC4. If anything, it should add new multiplayer game modes, and perhaps add a bit more of a decent story and campaign. I'm thinking will it be about the Incursion Wars prior to the 4th Tib War? They sound like more fun missions to play than the crap family drama in CNC4. Once again, we can have strategic battles between NOD and GDI. Oh, and given that we've already had green, red and blue covers, I'm betting the expansion will have a purple or yellow cover.

Also, RA4. C'mon, you didn't expect them to give CNC4 without RA4 didja? And don't forget, Generals 2. What type of gameplays? Return of the base? Highly probable. Let's just hope CNC4 was a one time malady. In the meantime, I'll be enjoying the multiplayer, at least till the expansion/RA4/Generals 2/New version of Renegade. (After all, the CNC universe is one of the richest sci-fi ones out there. Lots of money to be milked. This is all that EA knows about CNC )

NOD support class. All the aircraft plus see the support powers.

Oh, just to clarify. In the pictures, you can see upgrades. How do you use upgrades in the game. Well, there is no tiberium harvesting. But there is a tiberium collecting. There are tiberium points in the game, where a tiberium crystal will appear. You collect it, and bring it back to your MCV deploy zone, and you get points to use the upgrades. Hence, I think that this sod of a game whilst not deserving title CNC, is very deserving of the subtitle Tiberian Twilight, meaning the end times for Tiberium.

Gawd EA hire me to write your stories, I'll do it for free...