Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight Review - PC

5.5

Gameplay: 7
Graphics: 5
Audio: 5
Multiplayer: 3
Innovation: 8

Introduction

It's been almost fifteen years since Westwood Studios' first instalment of Command and Conquer. Pioneering the RTS genre and relentlessly raising the bar for competitors for over a decade is a quite a feat. Few could say the franchise has been without turmoil, from the merger with EA to dwindling sales of its brother Red Alert, yet the Tiberium saga has endured. Now, the final chapter closes in what fans are hoping will be an epic conclusion to a timeless classic.

Gameplay

The story of Tiberian Twilight picks up several years after its predecessor, with humanity now standing on the brink of extinction as the tiberium crystal spreads across the few remaining untouched regions of earth. Enter Kane, the prophetic leader of the Brotherhood of Nod, who after years of exile has deciphered the Tacitus relic and found a way to not only stop the Tiberium, but also reverse its growth entirely. However, he cannot complete his work without the help of the GDI, and so a pact is formed. After years of hard work, as the uneasy alliance between Nod and GDI approach their final goal, splinter factions rise up from within and threaten to undo humanity’s last hope of survival. Despite what flaws the games may have had, the Tiberium saga has always had fantastic writers, and it's near impossible not to be drawn in by the story.

The game, as usual, is split up into a single-player campaign, skirmish mode against AI and online multiplayer. I should point out it requires "a persistent internet connect to play", even offline. The single-player campaign starts you off in a tutorial to help you learn the ropes as well as giving you a small insight into what has been going on in recent history. It also introduces you to the modified UI, the new Crawler MCVs, the Classes setup and the Upgrades page. After three maps you are given a choice to side with GDI or Nod - the stories are two sides of the same coin so it doesn't really matter which one you choose first.

It's hard to summarise just how much EA have moved away from the traditional Command & Conquer, forsaking the conventional base builder setup - Tiberian Twilight is an entirely new game. The UI contains many features from Command & Conquer 3, such as one-click unit production, though many of them are no longer needed. In previous games the Mobile Construction Yard (MCV) was only mobile to the extent of moving ten feet to the left, then unpacking staying there. Twilight on the other hand introduces the true MCV, the Crawler, a unit/structure capable of unpacking to produce every unit in the game then packing back up to move with the group. It even carries formidable weaponry.

This is truly an alien feature for the franchise. For fifteen years I've been building massive bases to harvest Tiberium and form an army. Now the game is constantly on the move, no more barracks, no more weapons factory, no more Tech Centre, ...