Kane presumably looking on in horror
at what has become of the franchise
After playing most of the C&C games both in the Tiberium and Red Alert universe, you’d think I’d be eager to play C&C4.
I have no good things to say about C&C4. I played one round in the multiplayer beta, that was enough to put me off buying the game. Sadly, a friend of mine didn’t have a chance to play the beta, purchased it, and later lent the game to me.
This is not Command and Conquer.
Heck, I’d barely consider it an RTS. Why would I think a game series that helped create the RTS genre, is no longer an RTS? EA LA (developers) decided that
- base building wasn’t needed,
- nor resource gathering,
- and that particularly large armies weren’t fun (the “population” cap is about 50-60, but the smallest unit takes 3, meaning a max of 16-20 units per side)
- a leveling system that restricts what units you have at your disposal
Instead, you have one of three types of ‘crawler’ (giant carrier where you can dispense units), each type allowing you to build different types of units or use different powers. The goal is to capture various control nodes – if this is sounding similar, its because Dawn of War II got there first, but did it “right” with squad based play.
While the C&C cinematics have always been a little on the campy side, C&C4 just leaves a bad taste in your mouth with poor props, worse CGI, poor dialog and a very lack lustre performance by the usually brilliant Joseph Kuncan (who has always played Kane in the series). The game isn’t helped by laughable DRM (you have to be online to play…even single player) and restrictions (no LAN play).
While this might sound like me being bitter about change, the game simply isn’t fun. In singleplayer you’re either bombarded with three or four enemies all with higher level stuff than you or you’re waiting for stuff to happen, in the form of waiting for a timer to tick down or for nodes to be captured.
The last C&C game, Red Alert 3 wasn’t the mind blowingly awesome game that everybody wanted, but C&C4 retroactively boots its rating. This is the sad, final chapter in the “Kane Saga”, and the last game I’ll play from EA LA for a long time.
No star rating can be given for this monstrosity.
Will Wright’s (of SimCity and The Sims fame) Spore was released on September 4th, a game I’ve been eagerly awaiting since seeing demonstration videos of the game back in 2005. I must admit I’ve kept myself out of the loop, so that the anticipation and inevitable long wait didn’t kill me. Unfortunately it wasn’t until after ‘completing’ the game that I learnt it was designed for the casual gamer (in other words, its an extremely shallow, cutesy and repetitive game). ‘Completing’ is something you can never do for Wright’s games it would seem (being all sandbox games essentially), but I use the term in sense of ‘done-anything-I-was-going-to-do-in-the-game-and-have-now-uninstalled-it’.
Most of my gripes are particularly with the Space Age, because that is where the majority of the game is situated (as it only took two hours to progress through spore, creature, tribal and civilisation stages combined). During the Space Age, the game tries to do too much and unfortunately it can’t pull it off with the shallow/basic gameplay route. If you can get past the tedious nature of being the universes defender against biological disasters and the occasional pirates which steal spice one unit at a time, Spore presents a very basic trading game. There is no way to tell who you’ve visited or sold to in the past, no way to predict what they’ll pay for your spices on the next trip, and the only way to see is to fly into their solar system and around their planet – urgh! Oh yes, you’re supposed to be wowed at the supreme power you wield to terraform a planet, but the only reason you do that is to generate more spice to trade. The excitement of terraforming a world and building a new slave factory colony is diminished when all you have to do is hold down the left mouse button after selecting the appropriate tool.
While you’re conquering the universe in the name of…well whatever you named your Empire, you’ll often get called back to ‘duty’ to prevent a planets ecological disaster. Oh dear, a nuclear accident? A planet hurtling dangerously close to a sun? A meteor on its way? No. Some animals mutated/got sick, they now have glowing tails, and you have to kill the five mutants (it always seems to be five) before they infect the rest of the species and they become extinct; failure to do so will repeat the process slowly eliminating all creatures from a planet. That’s the best they could come up with? It wouldn’t be too bad if you weren’t either asked to do that for your empire and all your allies or recalled thousands of light years away, through several worm holes away during the middle of large scale battles.
Speaking of space battles, as you start off you are in an understandably weak vessel with limited weaponry, but as the game progresses you can buy new weapons as well as upgrade existing ones. The problem is, only one enemy race seems to have weapons that can approach or rival yours and even then its limited to their spacecrafts – their cities can be wiped out with a single bomb (MegaBomb, doesn’t cost anything to use) making combat quick and easy, you spend most of the time scrolling in and out of solar systems.
With the amount of grinding (eliminate this set of creatures, abduct that alien/plant, scan this surface) in the game, it just feels too much like a single player MMORPG. Perhaps I was just expecting too much from Spore, at the end of the day I really just wanted less Sims-in-Space, and more SimCity-on-a-universal-scale.
Well, McGee is back to it again and this time in partnership with GameTap is offering the first episode (A Boy Learns What Fear Is) of his game series, Grimm, free.
I’ll cut to the chase, its 193meg of rubbish.
Graphics
In a gaming world obsessed with realistic graphics, it’s refreshing to see games that differ from the norm, be it celshaded hijinks like XIII or Team Fortress 2, or seemingly water-coloured games like what I’ve seen of Diablo III thus far.
Grimm certainly lacks the realism, but unfortunately also lacks and sort of quality in the graphics department. Utilising the Unreal 3 Engine of course gets it gets motion blur, but incredibly low quality textures, models and even animation reminds me of the first generation of game mods, certainly not something you’d see from a “seasoned” professional such as McGee.
Gameplay
Mario or Sonic are fine examples of platformers. You run around, you collect things, you dodge or defeat evil, and then you arrive at the end of the level. Often there will be a series of jumping puzzles that require varying degrees of skills to time and pull of the jumps perfectly, else you face doom. 3D platformers are much the same.
Well, Grimm’s a platformer too, a 3D one at that. Unfortunately, there is no real evil to dodge or defeat, you simply run around somewhat slowly spreading “darkness”. When you stand still, you pee. Yes, you pee. You pee and then you can jump to where your pee hits. So there goes the puzzle bit of jumping – you’re given an exact guide as to where you’ll land.
You also get to perform a “buttslam” by pressing the jump key twice. It spreads darkness a little further, or stuns those trying to clean up darkness.
Should you still insist on playing this game, there are six levels which shouldn’t take you more than five minutes each if you want to convert everything to darkness. If you don’t, maybe two or three minutes each. The entire game was over in less than the time it took to download for me (I’m on 1.5mbit ADSL)
Bugs
- Apparently will throw a bit of a hissy fit on x64 installsTurns out this is a problem with the GameTap installer which requires a 32bit system. Works fine if you install from ‘setup.exe’
- If you’ve got UAC turned on, you must force it to run as Admin, otherwise you can’t change game options and even worse, you can’t progress anywhere in the game. You’ll finish a level, and it’ll restart the level.
- Alt tabbing caused instant crashes for me.
Closing Thoughts
I don’t know what the target audience is – it’d be too dark for littler kids, the dialogue is too dry/boring for ‘adults’, and the gameplay is too boring for everybody. Edit: American confirms (in the comments) that the game is aimed at the casual gamer.
Despite how little I think of reviews giving games a rating, I’ll have to give this one a over generous 1/5. The first point is for the price – free is good, and the second is for licensing the UE3, so that Epic can stay in business long enough to inevitably make UT4, or better yet, Gears of War 3.
McGee, if you read this I’m sorry, I’m not trying to break your heart, but this game was crude not just in the idea of game, but execution of the game as well.
