Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars

For the last day or so I've been playing the latest installment in the Command & Conquer series of games, Tiberium Wars. It took me a while to find a company selling it that shipped to Sweden. Apple store U.S.A. had it but wouldn't let me have it shipped here and the swedish store didn't have it. In fact, I couldn't find a single swedish or european store who carried the mac version. Eventually I stumbled upon Macgamestore.com and found that they shipped internationally and had Tiberium Wars in stock.

After waiting "patiently" for about five days it finally arrived last night. What struck me at first was that the box was in the same format as most games are these days, a regular DVD case. This did not surprise me but I was, as always, hoping for a real box like the ones games used to come in, like the original Command & Conquer came in.

Anyway, Installation was a breeze, just pop the disc in and drag the .app directory to my Applications directory, took a few minutes to copy everything over. After finishing the install I started the game and clicked the update button, another 80 MiB or so had to be downloaded to enable online play. Downloading the patch took almost as long as the install from the DVD but at least it wasn't chugging along at 30 kiB/s like some patch downloads do...

The game itself was just what I had hoped it to be, a return to the classic C&C, no more Red Alert, no more Renegade and no more Generals, thank you EA, for once you did something right. The sidebar on the right side of the screen is back, the factions are once again the Global Defense Initiative and NOD (although there is now also a common enemy, an alien race called the Scrin).

Much of the game will feel familiar to those who have played the original game, the style of play is pretty much the same, there are full motion videos between missions again and both sides have their original characteristics; the GDI forces have heavy tanks and do a lot of damage while the NOD forces are stealthy and have good base defenses.

One problem I did notice was that when I tried running the game on my TV it only allowed me to choose between 800x600 and 1024x768 for the resolution, neither of which is my TV's native resolution, a minor gripe but still an annoyance. I've also noticed that certain levels are a bit unbalanced and are hard to complete if you don't already know what will happen as unlikely events will sometimes take place rendering you defenseless (the classic C&C "dirty trick" of course being when you have to put all your forces into destroying the enemy base and just as you think things are starting to look up the enemy airlifts in a bunch of reinforcements that attack your base).

All in all I'd say that this is definitely a game worth buying, Cider works really well and I haven't found any major bugs or inbalances in the game (except for certain levels being almost impossible the first time you play them, but that's to be expected from any game with the Command & Conquer name).