Product Reviews

This follow-up to the grandaddy of real-time strategy is making an embarrassing attempt to look down with the kids, and also showing its many rivals how to have fun. Twelve years on from the original Command & Conquer, the formula has barely changed. It's still top-down battles won by base-building, simple resource collection and tank rushing. A few new, excitingly destructive, units and a move to a pretty 3D graphics engine doesn't constitute innovation. Amazingly, though, it's hard to call this a bad thing.

Yes, the formula is the same and instantly familiar to anyone who's ever played an RTS, but unlike its more po-faced prequels, the execution here is pure cartoon. Command & Conquer 3's war-torn sci-fi universe of preposterous plots and constant explosions is so exaggerated that calling it a strategy game is bending the truth. Really, this is an action game that involves a bit of building, and even that's incredibly simple. There's very little tactical thinking called for outside of constructing a massive army out of the best units you have available,

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then sending it off to the other side of the map, sitting back and watching the carnage unfold.

Because of this, it'll seem objectionable to lovers of deep, thoughtful, serious strategy. There's a lot of tongue in cheek here, and it's designed to entertain rather than truly challenge its players. As such, it's a refreshing alternative to games such as Company of Heroes and Supreme Commander. These are superior games for sure, and games that strive for original ideas, but they're also complicated and entirely straightlaced. They're for people who feel they've mastered real-time strategy games, whereas Command & Conquer 3 is after the widest audience possible.

Even dedicated fans of the genre can take a lot from it, though. It's so over the top, not having fun is almost an impossibility. Its explosion-filled wars are peopled by giant robots, nuclear bombs, invisible tanks, enormous UFOs and crazed mutants. Though everything looks very different, it is all controlled and destroyed in the same way, so it's a game you can play with most of your mind turned off. The sheer scale of destruction means you'll feel pretty good for scoring a victory, though it's unlikely you've done anything clever.

Between the fights, the traditional Command & Conquer sci-fi soap opera cutscenes tell the neverending story of the war between the GDI military and the Nod terrorists. Together with the shameless way the new playable faction, the Scrin, rips off any number of alien invasion movies, it's pretty clear this isn't a game to be taken seriously. As a dumb-but-happy celebration of things going boom, though, Command & Conquer 3 does a stand-up job.