Product Reviews

Last year's Command & Conquer (C&C) 3 saw the venerable series return to its original explosive action, but it wasn't an overly tactical game. Its first expansion pack tries to fix that by introducing a slew of new playable specialist sides. They're variations on existing themes, but they mean that multiplayer bouts of C&C 3 aren't the mindless carnage they sometimes were.

This is good news for online competitors, but lone players will be more interested in the solo campaign. Its extensive cut-scenes focus entirely on C&C's pantomime baddies - The Brotherhood

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of Nod. They promise answers to age-old cliffhangers in the series' storyline, but never really deliver them. Logic is thrown to the winds, as is the C&C way, but a lack of flair and humour this time makes for something that's unintelligible to new players and unsatisfying to old hands. The missions themselves have nothing to offer anyone who's played a mainstream RTS before; they're simply there to slog through to unlock the cut-scenes.

Your attention is best directed to the new global conquest mode. Rather than a fixed sequence of missions, this open-ended turn-based mode sees you snatching Earth by increments. If an enemy occupies a patch of land you're trying to grab, you zoom into a standard C&C 3 battle. It's not a new idea: it's borrowed from, most notably, the Total War games, but it's treated with more panache than might be expected. Crucially, it feels like its own game and not just a token system to string together a series of cookie-cutter battles.

The global conquest mode is all that saves Kane's Wrath from being a fans-only affair. The rest of the expansion pack is too impenetrable for anyone not reared on 15 years of C&C.