JMoe: The Mastermind

Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars launched in the US on March 27th 2007. I picked up a copy of the Kane Edition (aka the Collector’s Edition) on release day, and spent most of Spring Break playing the game. It’s time for a full review. I will try to avoid spoilers, but you might consider some of the full text a spoiler. I’ll put it as part of an exceprt so that you don’t need to read potential spoilers if you don’t want.

Overall, the game has a great storyline, and a fun campaign. The three campaigns cover the same series of events, but you see them from the perspective of each side. The campaigns should likely played in the order GDI, Nod, Scrin. With this you will first get to see the entire war, and then see the motivation behind it, and then get to see the ending of the war, and the cliffhanger ending.

Comparing Tiberium Wars to past C&C games, it comes out favorably. The single player component is far superior to that in C&C Generals, although it doesn’t have quite the same fun factor as Red Alert 2. I have not tried online multiplayer, as I am not a fan of losing a game in 5-8 minutes. LAN play works well, and it also functions fine over Hamachi (a no-configuration VPN software). The game can get rather laggy when playing LAN games over Hamachi with a large number of players, but part of that could be the system configurations involved.

The system requirements for Tiberium Wars are surprisingly low. It runs tolerably on my desktop, which is an Athlon XP 2400+ at 2.1Ghz, a GeForce 6800 128mb, and 1 gig DDR 333. The graphics look good at medium/high detail at 1024×768. The biggest bottleneck in my system is likely CPU, although the graphics card is now 2 generations behind. I did notice some issues with audio synchronization in the FMV sequences, which is likely due to my CPU. I have not tested the latest patch which is said to help with some of those exact issues.

Overall, Tiberium Wars provided me a lot of fun on my first trip through the campaign, and there’s still a lot left to do, as there are intelligence information and bonus objectives throughout the campaign missions which require replaying the mission to try to collect them all. I’d give the game an A-, as it is very well done, but a few minor hiccups, such as the audio/video synchronization, and a few crashes have hurt the game a little bit. It’s still a lot of fun. Now I just need to wait for the SDK to be released to allow creating modifications of the game to “fix” a few problems.