Review by: Troy Goodfellow

There used to be a code. There was an understanding between developers and gamers. They would make a game in which you could explore all the content in your own time and we would play it understanding that though we might not see everything in one sitting, we would be rewarded for exploring and experimenting.

Somewhere along the line, developers started thinking of all games as role playing games. You don't get your fireball spell at level one. Why should you be able to play the battle or faction you want to play without jumping through hoops first? Content started getting locked and you were now rewarded not for exploration as much as you were for grinding. Sink the time in and you would be rewarded with all the toys.

Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight is probably the first real time strategy game to wholly embrace RPG design. You can play either the GDI or Nod factions as one of three different "classes", each with different weapons and skills. The Offense faction is armor heavy, the Defense faction is about static defenses and infantry, and the Support faction is about airpower. You can swap between these factions in a game, if you like, but you have nowhere near the combined arms funkiness that you find in a typical RTS.

The shock of this design, however, is that you are cut off from a lot of the neat units, toys and powers until you level up your profile. Your early skirmishes see basic units smacking each other around and slowly accumulating experience points for that profile. If you gain the magic number of XP in a session, you still don't get to see the new units until you play a new game, so it's even more cut off that your standard D&D progression. Once you get to the point where you can upgrade your units, you can engage in a peculiar capture-the-Tiberium game where you rush to grab some crystals and then haul them back to your base. It's very weird, but that's all the resource collection there is.

Unveiling a unit tree session by session is not entirely new, but it's usually consigned to the story based campaign part of a game. Even multiplayer games are tied to leveling up your classes. Ideally this would lead to a lot of cooperation online – everyone doing their own specialty – but since you never get to see everything until you've gained a lot of experience. Unlike the other C&C games then, you can't just fill the game out with rookies and hope that they can contribute. You will need to make sure your teams are roughly equivalent in level as well as skill in order to really get the most out of this.

The less said about the campaign, the better. EA has decided that this final chapter should have less scenery chewing and more heart with the result that it is even more unbearable to sit through. There's some nonsense about Kane joining the GDI and a splinter Nod faction and then Kane splits from GDI and blah blah blah. None of the missions are particularly interesting, but they do demonstrate how the leveling up works and what you can expect at each level.