~Command & Conquer

Reviewed By Martin Keen


"Large, sumptuous and detailed realisations of all military hardware".
Any game with a quote like this on the box would normally have me
running a mile. Yes, Command & Conquer is a war game.

But hold it right there! Don't stop reading just yet. C&C isn't like
normal war games - this one is actually fun. Its the sequel to Dune 2
after all.

The writers of this game, Westwood Studios, have already planned two 
sequels to what was already a sequel of a sequel in the first place.
With such a lot of forerunners you'd expect the game engine to be
pretty polished and refined. It is.

Its the graphics that will astound you at first. From the moment C&C
is inserted into your CD-ROM drive quality seeps out. It has to have
the most impressive installation routines ever devised with sound and
video incorporated. 

Every mission is launched with some very impressive rendered sequences
and a bit of FMV thrown in too. Its worth completing the missions to
see these sections alone. Thats easy to say though - completing the
missions is the one sticking points of the game.

Missions are mostly the same as in Dune 2. Set up base, create
soldiers and vehicles, then launch an attack on the enemy base while
at the same time defending your own base and collecting crystals to
pay for it all. But Westwood have added an number of other missions
where a base cannot be built, you're just issued with a few men and
a couple of tanks and you must explore the landscpae and find the
best strategy for taking out the enemy. This can take a awful lot of
attempts, each time refining your tactics enough to get a little bit 
further into the enemy camp.

The most entertaining mission of all is the commando level. You have
just one guy with which to take out an entire base. Fortunately he's
rock hard and can take out men from an incredible distance with just 
one shot. He's got quite a personality too, gloating over his 
successes with cries of "he's not such a tough guy", and "keep 'em
coming" in a humourous gruff voice. Its damn hard but its also damn 
fun.

In fact the entire game of Command & Conquer is damn hard. Failure
becomes an all to regular occurance. One or two difficult missions is
fair enough, but the unrelenting challenge of the missions begins to
grate as you have to work harder and harder to complete the levels.
By level 7 or 8 you'll become increasingly fed-up with permanently 
being stuck, and being so outnumbered with much poorer facilities to
use than the opposition.

If you are very patient or a natural computer gamer than Command & 
Conquer is going to give you a lot of pleasure. Its a huge improvement
over Dune 2 in almost every way, and the presentation is quite 
stunning. Unfortuanately the skill level required might prove just
too much for some players, and one of the best games of the year will
have been wasted with an unrealistic difficulty level.

Still, at least you won't complete it in a day...