Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars [PC]

Up from the dormant comes Westwood/Electronic Arts' Command & Conquer license. This is a franchise that's been comatose, if not outright dead, for about 10 years (Red Alert and Generals are separate universes). But thanks to the team at Electronic Arts Los Angeles, known most recently as the guys that brought us the superlative Battle for Middle Earth II, it's alive and kicking again.

Don't judge Command & Conquer 3 by its single-player campaigns with their live action cinematics, in which the cast meanders through bad lighting and worse dialogue. This script seems to have been written by someone who doesn't know the first thing about the actual game. In fact, there are intel files you can unlock that demonstrate someone thought up a rich mythology and backstory for Command & Conquer 3. Why couldn't EA hire him or her to write the cinematics? The best thing you can say for these cutscenes is that they're in high definition (which takes up more than half of the game's six gigabyte install), so you can see the chintzy sets and cheap costumes in splendid detail!

Then there are the campaign missions themselves. Defend the base, destroy the base, escort the trucks, use the commando. Defend the base, destroy the base, escort the trucks, use the commando. And so on. This is tedious trick-based RTSing at its worst, where the challenge comes from gimping the game by locking out certain units or features, or by using scripting that does an end run around the rules.

It sounds pretty bleak so far, but then there's the more substantial issue of the actual, you know, game. If you're okay with playing skirmishes and multiplayer games, Command & Conquer 3 has a lot to offer. This is a slightly sloppy, mostly grand, over-the-top, popcorn RTS that's surprisingly satisfying and easily the best Command & Conquer yet. It's a perfectly suitable follow-up to Generals, and it feels very similar. Instead of the US, you get GDI. Instead of the GLA, you get Nod. And instead of China, you get the aliens. Or maybe China is Nod. At any rate, Generals obviously informs a lot of the best bits of Command & Conquer 3.

But the team has also taken many of the lessons they learned in Battle for Middle Earth II. Most of these lessons are interface related, but many of them are matters of pacing, scale, simplicity, and depth. In this regard, Command & Conquer 3 is an unequivocal success, modest in its aims and wildly successful in achieving them. The secret is that there isn't any secret, or special twist, or unique hook, or innovation. It's formulaic and unambitious, content to revisit the formula Westwood introduced back when they were competing with Blizzard as the only RTS game-makers in town. Blizzard did charm, Westwood did mindless action. This is a perfectly retro tribute to those days, but with modern graphics, a juiced-up hyperpace, and the sort of interface an RTS needs so you can wrangle it into some semblance of strategy.