Command & Conquer 3: Kane’s Wrath
December 17th, 2009I was recently convinced to try out C&C3:KW (what a long fucking title) by a friend of mine.
Those of you who enjoy RTS games may be familiar with Emperor, which was the predecessor, technically, of all the 3d games in the C&C line. This particular episode strikes me as the most like that old, yet amazing, game, only lacking certain features and generally not advancing the game in any meaningful way.
New features (to me anyway) of note: The ability to take over husks left by certain fallen units. Also the whole unit integration with a supertank called MARV. Very cool.
Yeah, really that’s kind of it. They also lifted the shift click command queue from Supreme Commander, but it’s not there by default.
Old garbage: Special unit abilities that you have activate in a very fiddly manner. Not quite as bad as Starcraft, but still irritating. You still can’t queue up structure build orders, only units, for reasons that I’m sure would boggle the mind if anyone asked the developers. As far as I can tell there’s no way to group units together on the march, unlike SupCom, so you’re left with a bunch of weak units running off into the fight all on their lonesome.You’d also think that in the tiberium infused future we wouldn’t need ten powerplants to run six buildings.
I don’t recall if this was true in other C&C games, but you can’t repair units for a teammate either.
New garbage: There doesn’t seem to be a way to give units or resources to teammates, unlike Emperor, which is retarded. If you lose all of your harvesters that’s it, you just have to hope you can sell of enough stuff to build a new one. In Emperor, at least, you would always get one free harvester.
This is another good one. In RTS games repair units come in two flavors: those that run up to whatever you just ordered everything to attack, and those that don’t move at all when you issue the order. If anyone gives this more than a second of thought, it should be pretty apparent that what you’d like to have happen is for the repair unit to stay with the main clump of your units. The same thing frequently happens with anti-air units.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a lot of fun, it just isn’t exactly new.
Edit:
So, what I thought was shift click mode is actually a way point mode. Similar though. Overall the various command options are, what’s the word, non-smooth? Wait, no, unrefined bullshit.