Command & Conquer 4 Preview Page 2

02 Sep 2009 at 16:30:09 by Tim McDonald

We've heard before that battles are going to take rather longer than in Red Alert 3, and this was most definitely in evidence. While an epic battle in RA3 could - if you weren't paying careful attention - be over in about six picoseconds, dispatching the mutant forces I encountered took quite awhile longer here. While my force was admittedly small (and probably not what you want for heavily-armoured metal exoskeletons) it took a good ten to fifteen seconds to knock out a single Mutant Gorilla. Visceroids didn't take nearly so long when my assault team focused fire on them, and I was thankful for this as positioning became very important when they died: they exploded into a cloud of highly corrosive green gas which did a surprisingly large amount of damage to anything that sat in it for long. Destroyed enemy units tended to drop canisters which ranked up whichever unit picked them up; a nice touch, as historically trying to get a particular unit to rank up generally relied upon stopping everything else from attacking once your target was about to die so that a unit of your choice could get the kill.

Of more amusement was that this particular escape pod contained engineers. Engineers are, as has been the case for a little while in C&C, capable of entering and repairing the destroyed husks of big units – like, say, the Mammoth Tank husks I'd seen sitting around. I'm sure you're aware of my love for big stompy vehicles of death by now, so you can doubtless imagine the joy my little heart felt.

Other escape pods were defended by mutant bases which periodically spawned Visceroids and Mutant Gorillas as the firefights blazed on, which necessitated both a decent distance from the spawning, and an ability to switch targets to Visceroids whenever the sods appeared so that they could be destroyed while they were far enough away that the gas wouldn't cause problems. Again, the building itself took a lot longer to destroy than expected for the C&C series, and with a group of Mammoth Tanks assisting I can't quite put that down to bad force composition.

Which led on to the second part of the mission. Now that the area was secured (which I assume is American military slang for “murdering the indigenous population”) we needed to get the transport back online, by capturing nearby Tiberium nodes and keeping them under our control. This was made significantly more tricky as Nod knew we were there and were sending in Crawlers, which would arrive in a matter of minutes.

Different units have different movement methods, which came in handy here. We know that some Nod units will have an ability to burrow but it was my mechanized units that mattered here, as the lighter mech-types are capable of bounding up rocky slopes while my Mammoths had to grind determinedly along a different path. As the nodes were captured by getting a unit into their control radius and leaving it there for a little while, my speedier, more mobile units were of greater use. The Mammoths returned to the transport and sat with the Crawler to await the Nod assault.

Which was a tad underwhelming, but that was most likely because I'd shot past the command point cap with the amount of Mammoths I'd captured. Scorpion tanks did their best, but as my entire force – barring my lovely, nippy walkers – were camped at the crashed transport, they didn't stand much of a chance.

So I decided to impose a challenge on myself. I left a small detachment of units at the transport, along with the Crawler which was currently upgrading and was more than ready to pump out replacements for any lost units, while the rest went on the warpath for the enemy Crawlers. I wanted them both dead before the transport was fully repaired and the mission ended.

Crawlers, admittedly, are tough. Even with a group of ranked-up Mammoths shooting, it took a fair amount of time for the thing to explode, and with a constant supply of enemy units streaming out, things were actually surprisingly close. Imagine my disappointment when I learned that destroyed enemy Crawlers will respawn a few minutes later.

There's still a lot we don't know about C&C4. The respawning Crawler mechanic makes me believe that we might see cleverer objectives than the old standby of “destroy this base” or “rescue this kitten.” Likewise, the impact of a mobile base isn't easily discernible from a mission that focuses on defending one point, and we've not had a first-hand chance to see how the player progression is going to function. Three things, however, are clear: one, if the lack of credits stays true across all modes and missions, this might actually be both a fantastically accessible game and a deeply strategic one. Two, the less hectic combat but nippy mission progression might actually make this both fantastically accessible and deeply strategic. Third, I can't wait to get my hands on it, again.

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