Soooooo. After playing the demo. I need to say it's nothing really groundbreaking..but more or less Generals on crack. But I only played a skirmish game because I had some Supreme Commandering to do (
). But you still can't zoom out far enough and if anything it feels like the farthest you can zoom out is LESS than you could in Generals. WTF? All the shit is as big as a boulder and infantry is as tiny as a pebble. CRAZY scale issues here.
Not to mention the mini-map is somewhat useless as it's hard to notice where you are (if you're using the wrong team color) because it'll blend so well with the background.
But you know, I still find myself wanting to play this game...odd...
I find that the HUD is still somewhat cluttered with over-sized and some useless fancy decorations that you don't really need. The left sidebar (with your special abilities) is just huge. When I took the NOD over, I had three freaking columns! Imagine how crazy it'll if they have an Unholy Alliance!
Another thing is that most of the abilities cost $$$ now, so in a way, no more freebies..but that usually isn't a problem since Tiberi(y)um seems to give a lot more money now.
The bottom sidebar seems a bit useless. As the first three icons are hotkeys that should be well known to a seasoned CnC'er. It's Attack, Attack-move, force move, and some other thing, then waypoint, and what i dub "super way point". Then you have your defense stances which are a little more valuable.
As for the lower right Unit status..oversized..picture thing. Eh. It could have been scaled down a lot. I don't need a picture as fat as my ego to tell me what it is. Smaller picture? Sure. The four empty slots are there for unit specific abilities, while the top four below the name/health bar are what upgrades it has, and how many of that unit are selected.
I like that they still have the RA2 style build menu, where things are divied up into categories. It's nice. As you should know, the building system is not like Generals, and a little bit more like CnC having a kid with StarCraft. As you can see there's two "aircraft" sub-tabs and basically you can build multiple things, just by "Tabbing". I assume there's no limit to how many Airpads you can build, but each seem to house only four air units. Of course this is different when building infantry/armor. You just queue them up like normal.
One thing I noticed, which is different, which is NICE. Is that when you put a build order on hold (for units) and then decide you want something else but don't want to cancel (yes, i hate wasting all that time), that unit you just clicked on will build instead while the other will stay on hold! Marvelous!
Another thing is that when building something, before you click on it. It'll show you cost, time to build, and how much energy it'll use (for buildings). Which is a nice little tidbit of info.
Smaller details:
-One engie to capture.
-It's pretty.
-They like distortions a lot.
-Tiberium has a health bar now.
-And it's late and I can't think of what else to type.
-Shows you your "build range" and can be expanded.
-Unit's sound an AWFUL lot like they came fresh from Generals for GDI
-Infantry also come in groups now instead of one at a time
So on a simple scale of school grading, 1 being an A, 5 being an F. I'd have to say, a 3.7 perhaps. It's nothing spectacular, but it is nice to see a CnC back in the Tiberium world. The game definitely has it ups like EA not killing the CnC franchise. The pretty graphics, plenty of units. A handful of strategy involved. But I would like to see the camera zoom be fixed. It's annoying have to scroll just a bit to get to just a few yards. Maybe fix the HUD's and scale them a bit so I can see the battlefield more. Make the camera controls a little easier to use so I don't have to use the num pad, small things like that.
Will I buy it on release? Probably. But we'll see what REAL reviews has to say.
Last edited by MURcarnage (2007-02-27 02:45:16)