With the expansion to Command and Conquer 3 hitting stores I thought we should have a look to see if it’s worth the effort.
If you’re a true nod player of the command and conquer series, you would have finished the nod campaign in C&C3. I have no doubt that you would also have felt at least a little ripped off (and possibly a bit of deja-vu remembering that you we ready to finish the fight in Halo 2) at the ending of the campaign so an expansion who’s campaign focuses entirely around Nod sounds like the perfect solution, at least in story terms. Those wanting to know what happened to the unnamed character you played as in C&C3 will be sadly disappointed as you control a new character called “Legion” in the expansion – I know, epic name right?
Okay, so there’s no closure from the ending of C&C3 in the expansion campaign, so what is there instead?
The story is split up into three acts: Act I takes place after the events of the second tiberium war (for those who don’t know, C&C3 starts with the third tiberium war). Act II takes you through events that happened during C&C3, but looks at them from a different angle. Act III, following the pattern gives events that happen after C&C3. The game play through the campaign varies, but for the most part contains simplistic “go capture this building” or “destroy this target”. In saying that, there are still a few very memorable moments (being thrown into a battle where an M.A.R.V. is attacking your base, then after surviving and going offensive having to fight two more as they attack from both sides; is one such time).
The acting from Joe Kulcan does not falter, however the addition of Natasha Henstridge (think Species) was possibly a bad choice as she comes off as a piece of cheese that is trying to act as though she is obsessed with Kane but doesn’t quite pull it off. Carl Lumbly, the leader of the Black Hand does a good job of being a zealous, religious preacher in his own right.
So the campaign isn’t amazing and if you don’t like playing nod, you’re already disappointed. What changes to the game play of skirmishes?
Well, EA Los Angeles has created sub-factions from each of the main teams (ala Generals->Zero hour) each sub-faction having different styles of play, with additions and removals of units.
Below is detail on each of the sub-factions, if you just want to know what I think about the game-play, please skip ahead.
Nod is split into the Black Hand and the Marked of Kane.
The Black Hand sub-faction spends a lot of its efforts on burning things and as such flame tanks start as veterans, Avatars are called Purifiers and have automatic flame throwers attached to them and they get a spiffy new anti-air tank. To balance this out they don’t have any aircraft and don’t get stealth units (or abilities for that matter).
The Marked of Kane are cyborgs and as such are stronger than other infantry. The different units here are in the infantry tab. Replacing the machine gunner militia of vanilla Nod are the Awakened; who (with the Enlightened) have the ability to use an EMP charge. Replacing the Black Hand infantry are Tiberium Troopers, which interestingly act similar to the flame soldiers, except that, for a loss of damage dealt, they slow their targets down as they are being attacked. The Marked of Kane has access to the new Nod artillery as well (which comes stealth’ed =D).
GDI splits itself into mechs and an army of dykes who turn out to be able to kill anything they come across with relative ease.
The mech army is the Steal Talons. Players of older command and conquer games will notice that the Titan and Wolverine are back and added with an engineer who has a hand-gun and “heavy harvesters” that can garrison units, you’ve got a team that’s all about the large and overwhelming.
The other army is ZOCOM. ZOCOM is all about the technology, with all the existing GDI units but with better weapons or armor. The only unit addition to ZOCOM is the Zone Raiders which replace the Zone Troopers of vanilla GDI. The Zone Raiders are the dykes I was referring to before and they seem to do an amazing amount of damage to anything they encounter and that’s without the upgrades.
Scrin too gets its own sub-factions.
The first faction is named “Reaper-17” and the main idea behind the team is that their units are boosted as they are more in tune with tiberium and use it to their advantage. One example is the Annihilator Tripod which has the ability to absorb the power of a tiberium patch to fire more powerful green lasers. Reaper-17 also get the bonus of having their growth accelerator act like a tiberium spike. The faction lacks all but the barest of air-force and does not get a master mind.
The second faction is named similarly “Traveler-59”. Traveler is all about speed and mind-control. In terms of new units, they have the cultist which has no attack other than to control a enemy (but cannot control air units, epic units and structures) but you can build as many as you want. They receive an upgraded mastermind – the prodigy; who can mind-control with an area of effect and teleportation for both himself and a group of units. The other infantry change is the addition of the Stalker, who has the ability to deal large amounts of damage to anything that has tiberium in it (think refineries) as well as being good against infantry/tanks. Traveler loses out by not having the Devourer Tank or shields for its units, but can give upgrades in movement speed for many of its units.
The factions bring diversity to the table; but are they, a bunch of new multi-player maps and a small campaign worth your time? If you’re a fan of the C&C series, you will only be disappointed if you were expecting major changes to the game play. The expansion “expands” very cautiously and tends to tread softly so not to anger anyone who is already a fan of the series. In this way, it could have been a lot better. The only new team that plays drastically different to the original is the Traveler-17 with their mind-control abilities. Everything else is very similar to what it is in the original. Some might say that it’s too similar.
