Ureview by: carn3rd
Ureview points: 17
Ureviewer since: April 2007
|
Reviewed On: Saturday April 28, 2007
Price paid: $60.00
| Rating: 9 | Recommends product: Yes
|
Just a heads up that this review is for the NOD version of the game as I have not played it in GDI mode and will rate it when I do so.
After years of fighting and what seemed to be Kane's demise, he's risen from the ashes and is ready to lead the brotherhood of NOD into the future.
The game starts out pretty simple, by giving you missions in the beginning which show you how to work the construction/mobile/defense/offense/strategic aspects. All of the missions have bonus objectives, which you can do or choose not to. By acquiring these mission objectives you gain better statistics and medals (I'm not sure as to what they are worth or not, probably just self esteem). The maps which you play the missions on have a fixed view, which means that they are not able to rotate to any angle you'd like. The most you can do is zoom in. What makes the game good is that the missions are so variable that there isn't really any dejavu moments, which made me really want to proceed on. While some missions are search and destroy, tiberium is a very important aspect of the playing field, because it ultimates give you money to build your structures. One annoying thing is that when you have too many harvesters (to harvest the tiberium for the tiberium plants) they will kind of spazz out if they are waiting in line to unload the crystals into the refinery, going back and forth between each other or just rotate like crazy in space. The movies are shot in high definition 1080i resolution which take up more half of the installation files (roughly 6gb total install, 3.5gb movie file). They are well worth it though, the acting is superb and provide a good transition between missions. There are even in-mission movies which appear on the top right of the screen as you play the game.
Now playing as the "bad" guys brotherhood of NOD side was pretty interesting. NOD gets alot of technologies which are ahead of what GDI has to offer. But they are mostly offensive technologies, such as the obelisk of light, which are defense towers that shoot laser beams at any hostile approaching, they are very strong, very expensive, very power consumptive and very effective. To ease the power-struggles when building such structures, the power plants can be upgraded to harness and generate more power after you've setup a tech. center. Also they defense structures such as rifle/laser turrets and ASM sites come in sets of 3 when you build them, which give you a radius of where you can place them and look like they are fed with power to a 4th structure which also repairs them. This ultimately gives you more bang for your buck as well. Another neat technology is the cloaking fields/towers, which makes your buildings invisible unless one of them starts to fire upon hostiles, this feature is also implemented to some vehicles like the stealth tank, which glides along faster than any tank in the game and fires missiles at its targets, but has weak armor. One thing that C&C veterans may remember is Tanya from red alert. Tiberium wars does give you an option to train a "Tanya" but she's not labeled as one. In fact there is one mission which basically relies on her survival to destroy buildings and armies of men, which she does so by shooting red lasers. Nod's weaknesses are its offenses, although the stealth bombers are a nice touch though, but the helicopters have weak armor; they can be very effective against infantry units, rocket-eers will take them out with ease though. Most of the offensive vehicles on the NOD side had weak armor, the flame tanks are useful against armies of men but can be easily destroyed by tanks, same goes for scorpion tanks. A real advantage on the playing field is to garrison buildings with rocketeers, grenadiers & flame thrower units, which attack any hostiles approaching their way. If the building happens to get destroyed, the units simply evacuate and continue the fight on the battleground; although they are easily killed inside them if a grenadier squad happens to lob a couple nades inside the structure, the flame tanks have the same effect. What NOD doesn't have, or any of the factions, are water based vehicles, in fact there are no water based maps with the exception of one map hosting a GDI battleship for your bombers to destroy. The temple of NOD is another neat building; its basically a nuke station. When that nuke launches it basically obliterates anything in its drop point as show here via a screenshots I took:
Now the surprising event which takes place in the game is that there is an alien race (The Scrin) which sets down on Earth. Kane believes that this race holds the key to the ultimate powers which can be produced by Tiberium and also to the future for the bortherhood. The Scrin also happens to have some advanced technologies, such as force fields, which the nuke will not do as much harm to if they are not disabled. You get a taste to harness some scrin technology during a mission to acquire some of their structures via saboteurs, which also implements Nod technologies like cloaking and a ridiculously destructive rift generator, which when charged creates a black hole to suck a great amount of your units/vehicles/building into. The rift seems to be the most destructive weapon in the game. The ending of the NOD campaign is pretty disappointing (to me at least). It seams to leave you asking "what is going to happen next?" as you step into the light and are sent back to the main start screen. Overall though, its a pretty nice game with some quirks to it. The graphics are really nice with animations such as dust emerging from the tractor tracks that the tanks leave behind or the cloud shadows cast on the ground. The game even made my 8800 GTS geforce chug on full settings when I panned over tiberium fields on the maps with Anti-Antilisng set at full strength. The multiplayer mode proves to be of great quality and gives the game plenty of replay value. Although it lacks a the amount of 6+ player maps, the ones that are there are very nice. The multi player mode is the only way I gained GDI experience. What bothers me is that if you partner up with somebody, you cannot transfer your funds nor amneties if they do need them, which is pretty lame considering games like Warzone 2100 had such features. When playing multi-player you can also insert game bots, which can be set on various difficulty & behavior settings, which makes it more challenging and interesting at the same time. Here's some more screenshots I took of playing NOD & multi player as GDI. GDI review soon to come.
| |
| Pros: Great game experience, non-repetitive play missions. Great quality movie with great acting. Superb Graphics. Lots of replay value. |
|
| Cons: No water vehicles/maps. No sharing in multi-player mode. Weak ending. Lots of HD space taken up by install. Lack of high volume multi player maps. |
|
|
Ureviews RSS Feed
; "kane_edition.jpg")
; "CNC_3_Tiberium_Wars1.jpg")
; "cnc3announce_superhigh.jpg")
