I have played Command and Conquer since the first one and enjoyed it all the way along. I had heard poor reviews about C&C 4 and for a while I had been talked out of buying it. I finally broke down just to see if I agreed with how bad it was and to get some closure rather than leave my C&C history incomplete.

Now, I’m sorry I did.

Without further ado, my review in easy to read bullet points…

Overall Score

20%

10% of that is recognition for the poor developers who sank their time into it and a large portion of the other 10% is for nostalgia’s sake.

Pros

• Cinematics were of good quality even though the acting was rather weak at times.
• Yikes. That’s really it.

Cons

• The entire game was changed. The units, the mechanics, the interface, the gameplay, the… the… everything. Pretty much everything I can think of that was changed was changed for the worse in my opinion. It’s really quite shocking that someone let this game happen. A veteran C&C player will have no idea what’s going on.
• Nothing like a game where the UAC pops up every time you launch it.
• Online registration forms need to be completed before you can do anything with the game. You need to log in and have a persistent internet connection every time you launch the game in order to do anything including single player campaign.
• Playing through a single player campaign I don’t enjoy seeing a chat room full of randoms at the bottom of my interface the entire time. No way to turn this off.
• Scandalously short single player campaign.
• Having a very small unit cap sucks.
• Everything was different… and for the worse. It bears repeating.

That’s it in a nutshell. It was a completely different, small, worse, unsatisfying game in almost every way. I feel bad for having bought it. If you’re thinking about it, learn from my mistake. It will only tarnish your opinion of the franchise. If you absolutely need some closure, wait until you can pick it up for no more than 10 dollars somewhere.