Review by Zamble

"C&C: The game who started all the real-time stategy craze"

Actually, C&C is not the first real-time strategy game ever made. Dune II, also by Westwood, came way before it, and is know as the first one, but there were a few "ancient" games made before it who hold the title. The most remarkable is "M.U.L.E.", but anyway, on with the review.

Command and Conquer is the one who popularized the genre. It featured good graphics, nice CD tracks and, most of all, a very good gameplay, with multiplay. The game story is situated on a future not so far, where a terrorist group, the Brotherhood of NOD, is trying to conquer the world. As they start to become real influent, the Global Defense Intiative (GDI- Kinda like the militar arm of ONU) declares war on them. You may choose to become a member of any of the two sides, and each of the sides have its own set of units, weapons, veicles and, of course, strategy.

About the units: the game is based on ground combat. So you'll have infantry units carrying machine guns, flamethrowers, granades or bazookas, tanks of various sizes, tiberium (resources) collectors and some fututistic veicles here and there. There is also a special kind of unit, the engineers, who can take control of enemy buildings. The buildings, by the way, are quite what you would expect if you have ever played a RT strategy (remember most of those games ar based on C&C), like a main base, factories, barracks and so on. You can also built concrete walls and sand bags to protect your base. Unfortunatelly, the game system have a "building limitation", wich requires that all new buildings be contructed near the old ones, limiting te size of your base a little.

The two sides are quite balanced, even thought most units are different. The story for both sides is also equally good, and you'll always get a good video between the missions, explaining everything and giving some details of the future world. Also, the missions are well designed. In most of them you'll have to destroy everything, but in some you get to save hostages and things like that. I would also highlight the GDI missions where you have to control a single marine to stealthy destroy the enemy base. Marines, BTW, are units you don't get to recruit normally, because they are too strong (they can destroy any other infantry unit with a single shot and destoy buildings by planting bombs on them.

Gameplay: 8
Altough the AI is not any genious, it's mainly very challenging to discover how to beat the missions. Too bad this game doesn't have a "skirmish mode" like Red Alert, where you can set up a game against the AI without being one of the missions (like a multiplayer game). Multiplayer games are held in Westwood chat (Internet), or you may play against friend by modem and cable.

Graphics: 9
They are dated now, but at the time this game was released, they were very nice. The cutscenes are very nice too. Even the ones with actors!

The sound effects are very nice. Specially the death screams, very realistic. The music is in CD tracks, and they are mainly Dance/Techno music. Good if you like it.

Replay value: 6
You can play it twice, as there are two different sides. But not more, as the missions are always the same, except for some of them where you get to select where to fight. Anyway, the best bet for playing it again is multiplayer games.

System Requeriments: Any Pentium with at lest 8 MB RAM will do fine. Internet connection recommended.


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