Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars
May 23,2007 - The highly revered real-time strategy Command & Conquer franchise returns with Tiberium Wars. The latest installment is the best of the batch in quite some time. Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars brings the series to its former glory, leaving the testy introductions Generals had for us a few years back and picking up right where Red Alert 2 left off, giving us one of the most feature rich and in-depth strategy games the market has seen. Earlier this year Tiberium Wars came out for the PC and now its been successfully ported over the Xbox 360 with stellar results making it the second good RTS a home console has ever had. We’ll put it this way: if you have the slightest interest in playing a strategy game of any kind, you owe it to yourself to buy this game, no matter what system it’s for.

Last year, Tiberium Wars’ publisher, Electronic Arts, put out The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth II for the Xbox 360. To the surprise of many, it was easily the best strategy game ever released on a video game system. Now that being said, it controlled completely differently than the typical mouse and keyboard method, but with a few slight changes it worked very well. Tiberium Wars more or less takes the same approach as BFME did and just as well. You use the controller pad to maneuver around the playing field. The two triggers are the right and left camera views and the thumb sticks act as your pitch so you can see all of the action going on. You are able to select units with the A button and, just like BFME, it’s pretty forgiving when you want to get something. The side bar from the PC version has been moved down to the bottom and any time you throw out the triggers, it spreads it out so you can see exactly what you need to select. The control system is very streamlined and once you have it down you won’t ever think twice about what you’re doing.

As far as what Tiberium Wars features, you’re going to get an incredibly robust multiplayer mode that any C&C fan will be able to douse hours and hours of their time on Xbox Live. You’ll also get what could easily be considered the best single player campaign in a strategy game of this type since WarCraft III came out in 2002. The single player story is reminiscent of past Command & Conquer games. You’re part of the Global Defense Initiative in the first part and you’re fighting the evil Kane, leader of the Brotherhood of the Nod. If you’ve played past games in the series you know exactly how foul Kane really is. All of the campy, silly, and cheesy dialog is back in Tiberium Wars, and you get a star-studded roster of people acting the parts in the high-definition videos that play intertwined throughout your mission structure. Heck, they even have Josh Holloway who most of you will know as Sawyer on TV’s Lost! That’s about as cool as it gets.

Gameplay in Tiberium Wars shouldn’t be too unfamiliar to fans of the strategy genre. It’s a resource hunting and gathering, base-building, war-fueled game that really doesn’t deviate from its predecessors in any huge stretch. That being said, it’s fine-tuned in every respect that matters so even the most experienced players will find a lot of impressive stuff in the game that perhaps they aren’t always used to seeing.

The single player campaign is spread across three different vantage points: the GDI, the Brotherhood of the Nod, and the newly-added Scrin. It will probably last most players anywhere between 20 and 40 hours to complete the entire set of missions for all three unit types. Not just that, but there are several different difficulty ranges that drastically change the way you’ll have to play the game as the A.I. is very smart and each difficulty has them playing completely different. Rushers, resourceful, balanced; it’s pretty much all covered here. Beyond the basics there is also a large range of good achievements to unlock in the single player campaign, and the more you do per mission the higher the points you’ll acquire; if that’s your thing, of course.

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