Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars

Also known as: C&C, Command and Conquer, Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars [UK]

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The pad's still a problem, but the acting's fun

Words: Michael Gapper, Xbox World 360 UK

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The GDI and NOD have a pretty good reason to fight. Their excuse for going to war, as if one were ever needed in Command & Conquer, is the ballyhoo surrounding the Tiberium crystals that have poisoned Earth, rendering the majority of the planet as inhospitable as Milton Keynes. The GDI have secured all the nice bits for right-thinking citizens everywhere, leaving whacko leather-fetishist cult The Brotherhood of NOD to languish in the bad old badlands.

That might be their reason for fighting, but our excuse for playing Command & Conquer 3 from beginning to end is the brilliant array of live-action cutscenes starring Sawyer from Lost, Michael “Sam Fisher” Ironside, a couple of Cylons, Lando Calrissian and Princess Jennifer Morrison from House (she of the fetching fringe and bad taste in Australians). Each individual mini-movie is a wonderful melodrama-riddled ham-acting delivered by some of the greatest proponents of the art.

In fact, with its FMV-driven storyline and mechanics so old fashioned as to be almost quaint, Command & Conquer 3 is an unmistakably nineties-flavored RTS, which makes it quite comfortably at home on a console. The Xbox 360 is in no position to support games that require oodles of micro-management and C&C was always a game that was built more around racing up the tech tree and storming into the enemy base with the wrath of God than carefully strategizing. You’ll need to expand to secure resources in the early game, but the end almost always comes the same way, with giant tanks rolling up to your doorstep, guns blazing and missiles leveling everything you’ve painstakingly, preciously built.