NOT a typical review! Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight. (I want to work for stopgame.ru)

The whole series Command & Conquer delighted strategy fans for sixteen years. The first parts of the series — Tiberian Dawn And Tiberian Sun — have become incredibly popular games with recognizable tactics tank rush, fairly well-developed mechanics, video inserts with live actors, Tiberium, Kane… The list could take quite a long time. Each part of the series was released with a regularity of two to three years, which was an indicator of love for the franchise. Only two of the games went beyond the classic "unlimited strategy" — Command & Conquer: Renegade And Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight. The latter will be discussed in this review.

The developers showed us screenshots, fed us promises, trailers, gameplay videos as always. They swore that in the fourth and obviously not the last in part they will tell about everything mysterious and extraordinary that fans of the series have accumulated over sixteen years. Who is Kane? Why was he attracted to Screens?? How he attracted the attention of aliens to his bald person?
What is Tiberium? What kind of hedgehog Kane needed the Screen Tower?!

What did we get?.

We got radish with ketchup failure. Outright failure. The beta already raised doubts that the game would become a blockbuster. And the full-fledged part caused attacks of vomiting in all connoisseurs of canonical strategies, initially built according to a convenient and soul-friendly scheme: extracted — gave birth — attacked — gave birth — attacked — carried out. It has always been like this and I really liked it. There are no restrictions — rivet as much as you want. If you want, occupy all the resources and tear the enemy away from the money. If you want, invest everything in weak units and go en masse until your opponent goes nuts. If you want, invest money in technology and arrange a bon voyage with “mammoths” and heavy artillery.

But now our developers wanted to subject the nerves of old-schoolers and ordinary players to such hardcore tests that after an hour of playing you will want to howl at the moon and yearn for the money invested in the disc. And I’m not kidding. The fourth part of the franchise is a huge step back and a clear “disappointment of the decade that has just begun.”.

Veiled deception.

At first it seems that everything https://bookmakersnotongamstop.co.uk/review/magic-win/ is done more or less efficiently. The first insert for GDI (or GCD, I don’t remember, to be honest) is like seeing a street model advertising Terminator from the eyes: files are being selected, news broadcasts are playing, and one of the residents secretly sends everyone to the bathhouse and moves on, the most important events are covered: the completion of the construction of the SKT, Gideon’s renunciation of the faith of the Brotherhood, fears about sabotage and the Tower..

However, after the first mission, the understanding comes that the developers cheated. Moreover, criminal negligence in the game is rushing literally from everywhere, because everyone understands that C&C4 is a rotten ship. And if the third part became a confident and very long-lived multiplayer titan, and in terms of the campaign it devoted many RTS, now it’s clear to a hedgehog from Silent Hill that the franchise has not been reborn. He has degenerated. And EA Los Angeles is unforgivable.

The game can no longer be built according to the normal one, as it was in previous parts. The choice is given Daunty trio three types of assembly shops — Attacking, Defensive, Support. The attacker is a giant walking ant that rivets “Mammoths”, “Mastodons” and other heavy equipment. Defensive is the good old wheeled MSC, preparing units with a strong frontal part for battle, and also does not hesitate to build Obelisks (they are also now limited). Support — air attacker variant.

But the gameplay difference in crawlers does not help at all. Campaigns are not performing well. The very idea of ​​moving MSCs was very successful in theory, but in practice it resulted in very stubborn and crooked levels that do not differ in variety and devour patience and nerve cells with amazing tenacity. Artificially lengthened levels due to unnecessary actions are the norm for Command & Conquer 4.

Now you can’t even do what they loved C&C for — collecting green crystals with iron harvesters day and night. From now on we collect experience and build units for it. This idea has already finally made it clear that everything that was carefully glued together by Westwood’s people was chopped with an ax, glued together and chopped again. For me, an experienced strategist, the system of gaining experience became like dust in the air. The number of units was also limited, as was the amount of experience available for building troops and an army.

But the levels are something with something… It feels like there is not a war going on, but an excursion through the Midwest of the USA. Canyons give way to cities of the distant future, then walks begin through some strange forests, and again canyons and deserts. After this game, the mention of the word “desert” will make you angry and vomit. Just don’t kill anyone.

Tons of ink and pastels.

The technical component also does not shine. The graphics were raped and vomited, so the picture is not impressive. 2010 is not her level, this is immediately obvious. But they tweaked the palette, so much so that it physically hurts your eyes. The units are not designed well enough so that you can look at them and be touched, as was the case in the unforgettable third part. There was a balanced set of colors, and the locations impressed with the richest variety. And the tasks were targeted, where an excellent and solid set of infrastructure was needed, access to the largest amount of resources and the most modern troops. But the end was the same, and half the missions were repeated. But it was shown from different angles, differing in the reactions of the plot characters.

And here… There’s nothing like that here. They wanted to cover up the engine, which was full of sticks, with too bright colors and light. There is no precision in actions, the sense of reality of what is happening disappears. Traveling from one point to another, scattering enemies, destroying enemy crawlers (and one of these is destroyed in about twenty minutes), insanely tiring accompanying missions, where a bunch of little men throw “jaguar” buses with refugees — all this puts you on the side of any sleeping pill. And the characters’ personalities were generally brought to prostration. Kane looks here not like a charismatic leader of oppressed peoples, but like a showman tortured by eternal nagging with signs of philosophical schizophrenia. Dr. Pascal, despite the fact that he is a doctor, does not shine in front of the camera. Almost always behaves like a parrot.

And in many ways the problems with the video are due to localization. It feels like our translators worked for exactly two hours at a frantic pace. Completely cut and ruined text. And the voices are inanimate, lifeless, and do not convey the feeling of confusion of Dr. Pascal and Colonel James and the pure genius of Kane.

The penultimate nail in the coffin was the security system. It was made to protect the game from piracy, but where does it go?! Within two days, an unlicensed version of the game was lying on store shelves (I saw it myself when I bought mine for 600 rubles). And pious buyers received rays of rabid rage from DRM. My game crashed about three times on two missions. Protection turns on as if out of spite when it’s not needed.

As you know, ***** does not drown.

It would seem that we have passed the campaign, graphics and so on too. But there is still multiplayer! And here too there is nothing to say. It would be healthier to pour a bowl of soup on your keyboard than to continue playing “strategic shooters”. There is no smell of team actions, the servers are dead. There are at most about twenty people playing, but they are either stupid or reading. So it’s not worth wasting time on a multiplayer sub-clone of the notorious “Warhammer”.

Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight is a real impossibility, salted sugar and cold fire. This monster should not have been born due to its extremely ambiguous and shameful appearance, but nevertheless IT saw the light. Still, it’s a pity that games like Mass Effect 2 and Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 2 — Retribution are not adequately localized.