- Command & Conquer Tiberian Sun.
.com
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Westwood Studios proudly presents Tiberian Sun, the third
installment in the blockbuster series Command and Conquer.
Tiberian Sun reveals new and exciting ways to wage war. Rise to
command the next generation of Nod super soldiers or pit the
high-tech weapons of the GDI (Global Defense Initiative) against
the Brotherhood in the ultimate global defense.
From the Manufacturer
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Tiberian Sun is the stunning sequel to Command & Conquer. Fight
on dynamic 3-D battlefields where nature itself provides
rtunities: ion storms, destructible terrain, forest fires,
treacherous ice fields, and many more surprises that can help or
hinder your strategies. Choose from two very different ways to
play: command the Global Defense Initiative, or join the
secretive Brotherhood of Nod. Then prepare your troops for combat
in tiberium-infested temperate zones, arctic tundras, and full
cityscapes. Invent new strategies and tactics. Employ a deadly
mix of advanced technologies, high-energy weapons, guerrilla
warfare, and high-tech sabotage. A kinetic and living battlefield
created with new technology delivers things like flying shrapnel,
shock waves, and cing debris for an in-game experience like
never before.
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Review
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Although several expansion packs and the pseudo-sequel Red Alert
have been published over the last four years, the Command &
Conquer series has never yet surpassed or even matched the level
of excellence with which it began. And so there's a lot at stake
with Tiberian Sun, Westwood's third major release in the series,
especially because it draws directly from the original game for
its inspiration by returning once again to the conflict between
the Global Defense Initiative and the Brotherhood of Nod. But
because Westwood has no intention of risking any more than
necessary, Tiberian Sun predictably takes very few risks of its
own, and feels and plays just like the original Command &
Conquer.
Although the game's landscape looks different from previous
games in the series, its right-hand interface is identical to how
it's always been - one scrolling column is devoted to units and
the other is devoted to structures. You can designate hotkeys for
faster scrolling, and you can queue up to five units for
production from a single facility, though you'll need to build
structures one at a time. The interface takes up a fairly large
portion of the screen, but that isn't much of a problem because
the units themselves are small. That's not to say all the various
infantry and vehicles in Tiberian Sun look bland; if anything, a
lot of them look bizarre, and it may take you a few hours to get
accustomed to the game's new look.
While your infantry units are still little animated sprites that
look much like the infantry units in every Command & Conquer
game, your vehicles are drawn using voxels, which in practice
lends them a rough-hewn three-dimensional look. It's not a bad
effect, and you'll see its advantages no sooner than when your
harvester lumbers up and over the nearest hill. Some of these
voxel units do look pretty bad - the Devil's Tongue Flame Tank
looks like a giant shoe box, a far cry from Nod's menacing
original.
Tiberian Sun's units include a number of throwbacks to
Westwood's classic Dune 2, including a Nod buggy, which is a
spitting image of the heavy quad, and the GDI Disrupter, which
may as well have been called a sonic tank. Likewise, the story
involves a breed of mutants indigenous to Tiberium-infested
regions, which closely parallel Dune's enigmatic Fremen. Dune 2
fans will enjoy such references; Command & Conquer fans may find
them disconcerting. The fact is Tiberian Sun is a science fiction
game.
This emphasis on science fiction wouldn't be so problematic were
it not that Tiberian Sun rather shamelessly borrows unit designs
from other science fiction real-time strategy games, including
Dark Reign's burrowing APC and Starcraft's transforming siege
tank. The consequence is that fans expecting trucks, tanks, and
planes will be disappointed, while those already acclimated to
science fiction real-time strategy will find that most of
Tiberian Sun's units are unoriginal. It's also unfortunate that
the game maintains the series' convention of sounding completely
boring - while fire and explosions are right on, your units'
spoken acknowledgements become repetitive and tedious within
minutes. At least the game contains an excellent soundtrack whose
wide variety of intense and catchy techno beats will bring back
fond memories of the first game's great musical score.
And if the soundtrack doesn't bring back memories of playing
Command & Conquer, then everything else about Tiberian Sun
assuredly will. Tiberian Sun may look a little different, but it
won't feel foreign at all if you're even remotely experienced
with the series. Most of Tiberian Sun's construction costs,
units, and tactics have counterparts in previous Command &
Conquer games, which means veterans of the series will be experts
again in no time. Though there are more units per side now, as
well as important new considerations like the GDI's
ability to upgrade their facilities and the Nod's power to cloak
their entire base, you will quickly learn how to compensate for
these.
That's because the strengths and weaknesses of both sides are
pronounced and well developed: The GDI is powerful enough to
attack head-on but slow to do so, while the Brotherhood's potent
defenses and subversive but vulnerable units make it better
suited to sly tactics. But you'll notice that both the GDI and
the Nod must rely heavily on particular units and that going for
enemy Tiberium harvesters and cutting off his resources is just
as simple, just as effective, and just as crucial as before.
Engineer units, able to instantly convert enemy structures to
your side, are also just as deadly as they were in the original
Command & Conquer and are arguably more powerful than ever thanks
to Nod's subterranean APC, which can dump five of them right in
the heart of an enemy base. And just as in Command & Conquer,
should you lose your construction yard, either to an engineer or
to a concentrated attack, then chances are you've already lost.
But Command & Conquer has never been about long, drawn-out wars
of attrition. By the time either the GDI or the Nod reach the top
of their technology trees, they have not one but several means of
smashing large chunks of their enemies' bases with a single blow.
For that reason, Tiberian Sun, like its predecessors, demands
that you strike before your nent, and that necessity makes
the game exciting to play. Unit queues, good pathfinding, and an
excellently implemented waypoint system (which lets you set guard
patrols and travel routes) all let you focus on coordinating
complicated attacks instead of micromanaging simple ones.
The competent computer AI will keep you on your toes through the
two single-player campaigns, whose missions are varied, often
interesting, and usually demand that you accomplish not one but
several objectives. A few too many missions for both GDI and Nod
require trial and error before strategy, but at least the
big-budget full-motion video sequences in between scenarios give
you good incentive to press on, even if many of the actors'
performances are halfhearted.
When you're finished with one or both campaigns, you can keep
playing against the computer in skirmish mode, which stays
interesting thanks to the game's random- generator that can
build a to your specifications much faster than you ever
could with your average editor. Sooner or later you'll also
want to pit your skills against human nents, and you're
guaranteed to find them in droves on Westwood's online
multiplayer server, where Tiberian Sun is destined to enjoy a
very long life whether you like it or not.
And whether you like Tiberian Sun is contingent upon how much
you enjoyed the original, since Tiberian Sun is ultimately
nothing more than a logical extension of that game. If by chance
you didn't warm up to the first game back then, then there's no
way you're going to warm up to it now. And even if you enjoyed
the formula in its heyday, you may well find yourself enjoying it
less so now than you did four years ago, on account of all the
other great real-time strategy games that showed up during that
time, including Dark Reign, Total Annihilation, and Starcraft.
After all, Tiberian Sun is another real-time strategy game with a
science fiction theme, just like the rest of them. It's by no
means their clear-cut superior, though it's by all means a worthy
competitor. --Greg Kasavin
--Copyright ©1998 GameSpot Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction
in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written
permission of GameSpot is prohibited. -- GameSpot Review
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