Last night I was up in the early morning. A small amount of caffeine from a chilled diet coke provided me with just enough additional energy to be as responsive as possible, but not jittery to the point of degrading my skill. Determined I slouched in my chair. With my mouse hand loose delicately commanding my Scrin troops in the final mission of the final campaign, I found myself flustered. My mouth was dry. More diet coke. I escorted the mothership to her final destination completing the final objective. That was it. I had just completed Command and Conquer 3 : Tiberium Wars.

So what were my impressions?
Command and Conquer 3 is a beautiful game, has amazing game play, tells an excellent story, and provides hilarious cinematics. Unfortunately for most that is not enough detail. If you were to stop here, I would tell you to go buy the game, and buy it now. For those of you who like the meat with tender details soaked in A1 sauce, proceed with reading this post.

Note: This review is soley for the PC version of Command and Conquer 3 and all details are limit to this version. I cannot vouch for anything discussed here in relation to the Xbox 360 version of this game.

Graphics: Command and Conquer 3 is truly beautiful in every respect. It is amazing to see hundreds of animated units on screen at once, blowing each other to hell, all with no slowdown. That may be attributed to the fact that I use an overclocked 8800GTX, but nonetheless, no slow down. Command and Conquer 3′s animations are very fluid and quite varied. When playing, do yourself a favor and notice the little troop on top of the GDI barracks patrolling the structure. Very cool. The lighting effects are also wonderful. Everything in Command and Conquer 3 casts shadows in real time, and in the event of a lightning storm, the eye candy is overflowing. Something that particularly impressed me was the exhaust fumes from anything that might emit such gas in real life. Powerplants, Orcas, Refineries, they all have excellent ventilation effects. As aircraft fly, they do so in a realilistic manner. They bob up and down, they circle, and so on. As you send your convoys of vehicles to their ultimate demise or vicotry, they will kick up clouds of dust that behave realistically. Foliage is also extremely detailed. Rather than large clumps we would generally see in most RTS games, we see leaves and branches swaying in the wind, casting shadows around them as they do so. 5/5

Story: In Command and Conquer 3, Kane is back, and as bad as ever. Essentially the NOD forces have decided that they did not really like getting kicked out of the tiberium free zones by the GDI, and hence the third tiberium wars begin. The Command and Conquer 3 story is presented through over the top, campy, cheesy, and overly important looking videos showing the conversations taking place from the player’s eyes. In the background monitors and panels gloomed in important looking blue light. Folders are repeatedly being passed from character to character, glanced at, and then put down. These little things added to make the set appear to be a place of importance are so lame, you can’t help but love them. There were a few cool twists involving NOD and the Scrin ( an alien race who began invading Earth after a liquid tiberium bomb was detonated ), but all in all, Command and Conquer 3 has nothing really out of the ordinary which would set this apart from other Sci-fi games. That being said, I loved the videos. I looked forward to them, and when presented with a tasty treat, I would sit at my desk with my mouth stupidly gaping. This was a classic Command and Conquer game. The story’s presentation was extremely entertaining, but the content itself is not really anything innovative enough to rave about; a strange mix. 3/5

Sound: Command and Conquer 3 sounds so good. Buildings crumble, units scream, and vehicles explode. Glass shatters, lasers are fired, and flame throwers ignite. This game, has a sound effect for everything, and is presented in perfect clarity. My biggest, and quite significant gripe is that there are no options to make this anything but stereo. I personally have a 7.1 surround sound system, as well as a sound card that can take a 7.1 signal, and create a 3D holophonic signal for use with headphones. How could they not include anything but a base stereo configuration? In a day where 5.1 speaker systems are very common, it’s truly a shame that at least this kind of configuration could not have been accommodated. This game does have built in VOIP for use with multiplayer. Something that has been around for a bit, but not used nearly enough. A nice addition. 4/5

Control: The best of any RTS I have played. The first thing players will notice in Command and Conquer 3 is the new addition of a context sensitive bar in the upper right hand portion of the screen. You will find tabs for your currently selected units, structure creation, support structure creation, infantry creation, ground vehicle creation, and air based vehicle creation. To even make this sweet thing sweeter, there are also sub tabs for each tab if you have more than once structure used to create structures, troops, or buildings. So what does this mean to the player? Most importantly this provides an easy to use system to create anything you might need while in the heat of battle. In Command and Conquer 3 there is no more locating buildings, clicking them, and then starting a production queue. This can be done no matter where you might be working on the battlefield, and doing this will not deselect your currently selected units. The name of the Command and Conquer 3 is efficiency. No more will a battle be decided by how well one player might know their hot keys, because to be honest, this is far quicker than hot keys could ever be. The second thing players will notice is the convenient location of their support power granted by bringing certain structures into play. It seems to have been the goal of the development team to ensure that the player did not have to leave their location on the field to do really that would require you select a building in any other RTS game. These support powers are now located in a hot bar on the left hand portion of the screen. If you want to order an Orca bombing run on the fly, just click the button, and click your target, that’s all there is to it. The final not so major, but ever so helpful change is how the space bar is used. If anything of interest is brought to your attention via the radar (such as your units being attacked), you can hit space bar, and you will instantly be taken to the area of occurrence. Although this is not really something that changes the way the game is played, it certainly adds a huge level of responsiveness on your part. 5/5

Gameplay: I think the thing that made me the happiest is that the campaign in Command and Conquer 3 has such a large assortment of mission types. For the great majority of older RTS style games, there were generally only the missions where you built a base, and overpowered the opposition. Now playing a next generation RTS, things a bit different, and these differences require much more skill than the turtle style of play. There are more missions which require that you use the units you are given to their maximum effectiveness. If playing with NOD you will be more stealth based, if with GDI things will be more forced focused. The Command and Conquer 3 campaigns are each tailored to teach and rely on both sides most effective means of winning, and this is what makes it so much fun. Playing as NOD, you will not win if you use the same tactics as when playing with GDI. This applies to using a GDI style of play when using NOD. Although their tech trees are very similar, they play extremely differently, which brings me to my next point; the tech trees. A complaint which could be made is that these are too simple. You can max out your tree in about 5 – 10 minutes. To me this isn’t really a weakness, as much as it is an effort to maximize time spent strategizing, and battling, which are the best parts of the game. This really helps with multiplayer matches, as they will only last about 15 minutes to be complete. All in all, both campaign and multiplayer will keep you coming back for more and more. 5/5

OVERALL SCORE: 8.8 / 10

Additional Thoughts: It’s the little things that make a good game outstanding, and Command and Conquer 3 game is full of these little things. This title really made me feel reminiscent of Starcraft, which to me introduced both PC Gaming and RTS to me. This is a game that is very true to the genre, and anyone remotely interested in the genre owes themselves a play.