Command and Conquer 4 : Tiberium Twilight

Kali ini, game yg dibahas adalah : Command and Conquer 4 : Tiberium Twilight..
Game ini saat movie2 nya, dgn org asli, dan gameplaynya agak rumit. Lumayan bagus, terutama grafiknya, tapi memang misi2 yg diberikan cukup sulit. Pada saat movie, ceritanya pun tidak mudah dimengerti, tapi setidaknya game ini mempunyai banyak unit2 yg bisa digunakan, melebihi C&C yg lainnya.

Berikut ini Review dari seseorang, bersumber dari www.gamefaqs.com :::

Introduction

Once upon a time ago, in between the first Command & Conquer game (retroactively dubbed “Tiberian Dawn” by EA), and its direct sequel, Tiberian Sun, there was a certain Tiberium game that many C&C fans have justifiably forgotten: Command & Conquer: Sole Survivor. Those of us who did suffer the consequences for our fandom and couldn't get enough C&C played this game and discovered that it was stripped down beyond recognition—well, the sound effects and music felt right at least. One adjusted from utilizing various groups of units to just one, and the unit balance did not even make sense. How could a Nod bike logically go toe-to-toe with a GDI mammoth tank?

If you are familiar with this game, then you may recognize many of the gameplay mechanics within the game that this review is for—Command and Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight. Yes, let me re-iterate that contrary to the dismay of many a C&C “fan,” particularly those who were (un)fortunate to play the beta, there is indeed a precedent in the franchise for its style. Regrettably though, this game is just as flawed, revealing that Westwood was on to something when they abandoned such an experiment.

Story

As of this writing, many persist in expressing their shock in the game's presentation. Those who suffered an aneurism of the heart from the news that mining would be standardized in Red Alert 3 risk brain hemorrhaging upon discovering the complete removal of mining in Command and Conquer 4. Thus, any element of economy (econ) management that one may imagine, from booming to harassment, is absolutely irrelevant in this game. Dune came first, but C&C established the RTS genre as we know it; this repudiation of its own child has an explanation, however, in what we would call “story.”

Tragically, C&C4's story does not give justice to the series. We receive no closure to C&C3 or Kane's Wrath. For all intents and purposes, we are only left to conjecture how precisely the Scrin were defeated upon their invasion/summoning to earth in C&C3, and who/what the Scrin are. In fact, the instruction booklet for C&C4 does not even acknowledge the Scrin, forcing those who are even remotely interested in the story to appease themselves between their own fandom and the paltry details the game offers. The second-most egregious violation that C&C is inexcusably guilty is that the game retcons the controversy surrounding Tiberium. Through three (plus) games, we have been led to believe that Kane knows how to harness the power of Tiberium, and GDI finds it and Kane to be a threat to the survival of mankind. Now, we are to believe that all of this fighting, roughly 70 years of story (you can catch up by either playing C&C: TD and C&C: TS and Firestorm for free from the official C&C website, and buy C&C3 and Kane's Wrath or refer to YouTube for the canon videos) was a ruse, and Kane allies himself with GDI (Yes, C&C fans, you are allowed a “WTF” here) and uses (surrenders?) the Tacitus as a bargaining chip, shattering everything we thought we knew about the Tiberium series of games (if you did pause to YouTube the canon, my bad).The Tacitus is then used to establish the Tiberium Control Network (TCN), the game's explanation as to the absence of Tiberium harvesting. It's all under control now.

So what is the game's story really about? Well that is a good question. The first two serve as experience-less tutorials to get the player adjusted to the C&C4 engine, where one discovers that Kane is indeed a GDI ally, and not all of GDI, particularly Colonel Louise James, approve. Likewise, Gideon, a member of Nod, has risen during Kane's 15-year alliance with GDI, and he's stirring up the rebel pot—yes, again; C&C fans know that it is a standard plot convention for Nod to be splintered. The amiability of the GDI/Nod alliance, as one would expect, diffuses; at the end of the tutorial missions, the player is given the option to follow either Kane or James, which consequently follows the path of either Nod or GDI.

For the record, I selected Nod first, eager to discover the resolution to what began with Kane's Wrath.

I have to acknowledge EA's valiant attempt to relieve these factions of their didactic dichotomies. One will find that GDI is not all good and Nod all evil. Unfortunately, the story is more than just cheesy. Romantic comedies are cheesy, yet entertaining. This game will have the player cringing throughout the cutscenes. The player is provided the most perfunctory “wife” character that I have ever witnessed. I struggle to think of a more irrelevant and fruitless attempt at emotional effect in any story I have ever seen, heard, or read. Colonel James is one dimensional and Kane (Joe Kucan) fails to achieve the uber-coolness of the character this series revolves around. The desperate, anxious Kane portrayed in C&C 4 could be interpreted as an attempt to render Kane as a dynamic character, but as I will discuss in the gameplay section, change has consequences.

It is difficult to imagine the turmoil that one is supposed to understand encompasses the world, because gone are the blue/yellow/red zones from C&C3 that represented explicitly the devastation that Tiberium has wrecked upon the world. Instead, the world's problems now involve things such as unequal distribution of wealth, starvation, and war—much like many developing or post-colonial countries today. The world in C&C4 has 99 problems and Tiberium ain't one.

The best part of the story is that the GDI and Nod paths are mutually inclusive. That is to say, they are both canon (if, at the end of the day, fans accept this as canon). So there is no need to worry about beating one faction and believing that one ending is better or more significant than the other. This is both a positive and negative since one would contemplate the purpose behind playing both paths if they both have the same result. Well, the details as to how the story develops would be considered spoilers, though I can say that EA succeeded in their guarantee in providing a definitive ending to the series. There are enough plotholes left in this game without the complications introduced with the prospect of two different endings.

Gameplay

EA can sufficiently pat themselves on the back if they were aiming for “something different,” and with Barry Harrowitz emphasis if “different” translated to accessible (simplified) gaming mechanics. C&C 4 is tailor-made for multiplayer games involving players of diverse skill. This is an interesting move considering the fact that most C&C fans play for the singleplayer (see: the birth of skirmish mode, Counterstrike, Aftermath, Uprising). Again, the TCN negates the need for harvesting, thus, “playing styles” are standardized through the usage of crawlers, the new-school omni-MCV that produces units. For the novice and lame alike, at the beginning of each game, the “Offensive,” “Defensive,” and “Support” options for the crawler will appear, allowing players to select and deploy. C&C4 uses a persistent “experience tier” system to determine available units and abilities, so one unlocks new features the more one plays (and dominates). This will prove disconcerting, if not imbalanced in multiplayer, because the likelihood that players' abilities and unlocked tech will vary is great. Even in the campaign, this limitation is painfully keen, because one will come against a unit or structure that is lv 15 or higher when one only has access to lv 5 units.

Then again, one could argue that the entire experience system and crawler-types are superfluous, if not broken. Playing through both campaigns, I finished Nod at lv 12, and GDI at lv 10 (just a smidge short of 11). I tried to play with the defensive and support Nod factions, but they were quite ineffective, if not inconvenient, lacking in either mobility or healing capability. I stuck with offensive through both campaigns, which was rather boring due to the lame story, the absurdly easy difficulty, and the one-dimensional playing style I was unwillingly “encouraged” to use for the majority of the game. In the GDI campaign, being a traditional GDI fan (who was converted to Nod after the awesomeness of Kane in KW), I looked forward to playing with GDI's support crawler and the uber-cool Orca. Negative. Even at level 10, I lacked the proper unit distribution to play that “style” effectively. The only “anti-cannon” unit I had was a tank; but if I wanted to use a tank, I would just stick with offense! I wanted to play with all-air like my crawler (Why is it a crawler if it's airborne? This question also applies to Nod's support “crawler.”). I also lacked an “anti-heavy” and “anti-laser” unit, which, if I wanted to have all the unit types covered—light armor, medium armor, medium air, heavy armor, reinforced, and the crawler itself—I would have to play the game more to eventually acquire the proper units so that I can play as I usually play my RTS games with heavy air. Having to “play just to play” is irritating if not completely discouraging. The Kodiak and Archangel in the instruction booklet taunt me.

Then (yet) again, why bother with the high-level units? I found myself dominating them with units such as avatars and mammoth tanks with my beginning-of-the-game tier units. This may be attributed to the 90's-era AI, which does not even prioritize threats or use effective counters. Notwithstanding, C&C4, in its third-most egregious violation of the series, introduces an unforgivable command point (CP) system, A.K.A., “unit cap.” Gone are the days of build-until-you're-broke. Now, a full squad may, if the player is frugal, consist of two anti-gun units, two anti-cannon units, one anti-heavy, one-anti-laser, maybe one-anti-air, and two engineers. That's nine units total, compared to the sometimes uncountable masses in pretty much every other C&C game (this includes Red Alert, though 3, for the most part, does favor micro over spamming). Many have said that this game resembles Dawn of War. I say, given the number of CPs, the generous unit hitpoints (400 or so for a nod buggy???) and, as I alluded to with Sole Survivor, the fact that a mammoth thank will take many shots to kill a Nod bike 1on1 (in C&C3, with the railgun upgrade, it's a one-shot kill; it's actually a waste of DPS to bother shooting a Nod bike with a mammoth tank in that game), this game borrows heavily from the WarCraft3 model, minus the heroes. One is to manage a small squad of units effectively in this game. With CPs, I find that the most effective squads consist of multiple low-tier units rather than three or four high-tier units. It is possible to “cheat” the cap by building six or so engineers when one is approaching their CP limit and then recover husks of high-level units, but hose husks have to be available. That is, someone would have had to disable or defeat them, which means that someone has to have them unlocked. The campaign provides plenty of husks or presents the player with high-level units to fight so that husks can be recovered. Clever game design or a cheap way to make sure that players do not get bored or frustrated from not being able to build those units themselves? I vote the latter.

One saving grace concerning the units is that C&C4 gives players the ability to scrap their crawler for another at will. In fact, as I mentioned, one can scrap any unit to free up unit cap space. These two abilities provide the option for players to mix and match units from the offensive, defensive, and support trees, should they so choose. Unlike in the campaigns, in multiplayer it will make more sense to play with a variety of crawlers, because the objective of the multiplayer games is not to utterly defeat your opponent (they will always get a new crawler and can build their whole army back in about a minute), but to accumulate “victory points” from destroying enemy units, controlling TCN nodes, or acquiring Tiberium (more on that just below). I am convinced that EA had large games in mind, from 2v2 to 5v5, because 1v1 seems too limiting (rush!). Larger games provide more variables, and it would actually be possible (I imagine) for a defensive-style player to camp up and wait for their superweapon to charge—if they are lv20 and have access to them. Most players will probably opt for offense given the tradition of RTS games and its players catering to rushing strageties, as opposed to turtling. Time will tell if turtling will (finally) be a viable stragety. But that is not for me to decide, for this is a game review, not a FAQ. Suffice to say, the option is explicit.

The TCN did not eliminate all Tiberium. One will find Tiberium of various colors scattered throughout the maps. It can be collected or retrieved towards a player's starting point by units to add points so that a player can upgrade the global abilities of his or her units. There are also crates which spawn upon the death of units in battle which come in green and blue flavors. Green adds veterancy, which used to be a priority, but I can hardly tell the difference between a three-star veteran and a fresh unit; the much cooler and rarer blue crates increase the power of the unit that collects, and this will be indicated by the unit becoming visibly more threatening, usually from an additional gun or ammo pack. Unfortunately (for players like myself), air units cannot collect crates (to my knowledge), so woe be to the air unit that runs across an upgraded Mastadon!!!

Graphics

I mentioned that C&C4's game mechanics borrow from the WarCraft3 engine. Indeed, this game looks like WarCraft or C&C Generals, let alone C&C3 or Red Alert 3. “Visually underwhelming” is an understatement. The units are large in scale, low resolution, and the zoom of the game insures that players can get into the face of an Avatar should they wish, but they cannot alternatively see much on a zoom-out because it does not scale very far. Though the textures are obviously present, the unit composition reminds me of the PS1-era game Cyber Sled, with the humongous tanks made out of giant polygons. The Nod bike is large enough to substitute for a tan, and I would take any previous C&C version of it over this one. But that is just one example among almost one-hundred. Suffice to say, it is my conjecture that C&C4's graphics engine was designed, again, to facilitate multiplayer gaming, reducing lag.

Miscellaneous

The one, the only thing that this game improves upon from its predecessor is the music. James Hannigan returns from his Red Alert 3 and Uprising debut with dynamic music, changing depending upon the action on the screen. GDI's music sounds heroic enough, though Nod's soundtrack may take some getting used to. The Nod victory music sounds like it is played in reverse! I call myself gifted in the art of music (my VGM collection is almost as robust as my game collection), but I'm willing to admit that my ear is not privy to the sounds of western Europe, if that is what Hannigan was trying to emulate. In my amateur opinion, it sounds like he was going for a northern Africa sound. Regardless, the exotic resonance is welcome.

For all intents and purposes, besides Nod's black and red and GDI's gold, I can barely differentiate between the two factions. I find their differences negligible due to the simplification and standardization of the game. In C&C3, it was foolish to try to fight GDI head-on with Nod. It's totally possible now, for both factions seem to have an “equivalent” for the other faction's units. Nod still has stealth and borrow abilities, but why would one use these if there is no reason to harass? Harassment was a strategy developed to distract a player or slow down econ. Because this game no longer depends on econ or expansions, I see no reason for surprise attacks with small squads, particularly because unit count will already be low, so splitting armies is risky. Furthermore, listening to the unit voices, the difference between Nod and GDI is too subtle; one will think that Nod units were also formally trained like GDI units. I struggle to find what makes the factions unique in terms of utility rather than artifice, the differences are so few in number.

Lastly, I must mention the number-one most egregious feature of the game, which anyone reading this review probably already knows about (like no Tiberium harvesting): to play this game, one must always be connected to the internet. If anyone needs a reminder as to why this is problematic, I kindly refer them to Mercenaries 2. Should stubbornness persist, I will allow the record to show that of all the digital gaming services, I favor Steam, and even it allows users to play their games without a connection, so that should an alien invasion or the Second Coming of Christ take place, I could download my entire gaming collection to my harddrive and play all of my games—offline—should I be abducted or ascend to heaven. That's not the case with C&C4. Barring the unlikelihood (in the near future, anyway) of the two events I have mentioned, one is far more likely to suffer internet outage for various reasons, preventing one from playing C&C4.* He or she will be effectively locked out of their $50 purchase. The reason for this? DRM, the acronym more profane to PC users than the most vile four-letter equivalent. If EA wanted to play Big Brother, they could have been more subtle about it through a patching or DLC system like they've done with Mass Effect or Dragon Age.

Conclusion

So here is my theory behind the DRM:

The combination of C&C4 features I have covered, including the simplified gameplay and graphics, the always-online necessity, and the experience-based tech tree lead me to believe that EA is using the C&C franchise to test the waters for a potential MMORPG-style RTS. While debates will ensue, questioning C&C4's categorization as a real time or tactical game, most will agree that it was unfortunate that this franchise had to be the trailblazer, when in actuality, it gets lost in the weeds of its own front yard. To use another metaphor, one would expect that the C&C finale would go out swinging, but instead, it slips on a banana peel and suffers from the consequential concussion injury upon landing.

Do not get me wrong. The game is not bad, but it is not very good, either. Quite simply, there are many other games out there that do what this game tries to do, but much, much better. The redeeming qualities of this game that preserves this game as mediocre are its multiplayer accessibility (one need not be the C&C best of the members at gamereplays.org to figure this game out, though I doubt they leave RA3/KW for this) and the C&C franchise name. It's still cool to play as GDI, and though Nod is not as “cool” as it used to be, it is Nod nevertheless.

5/10

*See EA.com's editor-in-chief, Jeff Green's comments in regards to his frustration concerning C&C4's DRM. If your internet connection even flickers, none of your progress or experience will save. It will be effectively a disconnect. In case anyone is keeping score, I'm taking away a full point off my review score because of the invasive DRM. Proceed with caution!!!