The first person to get their commando out can have a decisive advantage if they are willing to micromanage the little lady. Each of them can nuke a construction yard with little effort and the Japanese schoolgirl commando (seriously) doesn’t even have to get that close. Fortunately, I suppose, they are all vulnerable to point defenses and other bullet delivery systems. But if you can get your commando behind enemy lines, it could be all over.

Certainly, there are many elite RTS players for whom the general fragility of units is an opportunity, not a problem. It’s all about knowing the right meld for the early rush, you see, and if you don’t use your super weak dogs/bears/dragonflies properly then you deserve to get whacked. Equally matched players should be fine online, but there’s really little learning that be done playing against superior players, which is kind of the point in multiplayer gaming.

For most players there will be a reliance on massed forces, something not entirely out of place in a Command & Conquer game, but something almost blasphemous considering how carefully tweaked so many of the units are. Shouldn’t you use the freeze ray to immobilize enemy tanks instead of just out building them? It’s not that mass armies are bad—it’s that the subtleties of the troops at your disposal should be able to counter the massed forces or at least make them less necessary. Since it’s just too much trouble to switch Japanese guns between anti-air and anti-ground the sanest policy is to just build a lot of them and divide their purpose.

The super powers you accumulate have none of the drama or variety of the powers in Command & Conquer 3. Most on a tree are upgrades of weaker powers and a bunch of passive powers (stronger ships, for example). There aren’t many tough choices to make along the line because every power costs the same number of points. So if you can choose between, say, getting a bounty on killed units or dropping a space station on your enemy’s head, it’s not really a hard call.

Previews of the game pushed the campaign story, and it’s not hard to see why. You stick a bunch of B-listers (and George Takei) in a ridiculous story that is made all the more ridiculous by the heaving bosoms of every single female in the mission briefings. Apparently changing the space/time continuum means that modesty and professionalism go out the window. No one in the cast throws themselves into their roles like Kucan does when he plays Kane in the Tiberium games, and so the campaign movies are both too cheesy and not cheesy enough.

The campaign missions are fine as far as they go. You have the usual mix of base-building, escort and sneaking missions with nothing that stretches the creative energies of either the actors or the mission designers. The plots are all about betrayal and ambition and blowing stuff up, so you are stuck with maps and scenarios that get you from A to B without too much trouble.