Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight

“Any of those classes is going to have all the tools you need to be successful. It is possible to have a team of five offensive players and still win a match. However, the classes really play to each other’s strengths by working together as a team.”

It’s a lot to take on board at once, particularly for someone who struggled to complete the demo of the original C&C, which came on a floppy disc and was played on something called a 486. This time round, We’re on a 10-PC LAN in a disused dairy in East London, sitting next to none other than Kane himself, or at least the man who plays him, Joe Kucan.

There’s no shame in admitting that we make a pig’s ear of our time with C&C4, simply sending all of our troops to a fiery death before trying again with a different class, and similar results. It’s almost a relief when our PC crashes, sparing us the indignity of another crushing defeat. Although we later learn that we’ve been playing at level 20 – the highest. Yes, there are RPG-style levels, with persistent player progression throughout the entire game, whether in you’re in campaign, skirmish or multiplayer mode.

Although in terms of story it’s a classic Nod vs GDI scenario – The Scrin, C&C3’s purple aliens, having been dropped – C&C4 appears to be advancing the genre that the original Command & Conquer founded. The advancements will also impact on the single-player campaign, which will be fast-paced and heavily reliant on map awareness, albeit more forgiving in that you can simply redeploy your crawler, whenever your base is wiped out.

So is this really the end? Ott is adamant: “This is the epic conclusion of the Tiberian saga, the story that we started back in 1995. It’s going to be the conclusion of Kane’s plan, GDI versus Nod, the fate of the world, the fate of Tiberian, it’s all here. It’s going to wrap up the saga.”

Jan 13, 2010