Hellmarch: UDLR's Top 5 Command & Conquer Titles

On the eve (maybe) of Command & Conquer's rebirth as a free to play service, we take a look at the series' history and cherry pick the top five entries most worthy of your attention. 

One vision, one purpose etc.

5. Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2

Further down the pecking order than its predecessor due to an unwelcome shift in tone towards camp fantasy, Red Alert 2 still deserves a place among the series' finest due to its tight balancing and interesting campaign. Yuri's Revenge, the game's first and only expansion, added a mind control focused third faction and clumsily shuffled the existing Allied and Soviet arsenals in such a way that it effectively broke multiplayer. By this point the Westwood Studios were still doggedly clinging on to the ageing gameplay mechanics that made the series a success years earlier, while their contemporaries innovated, experimented and pushed the it further and further into irrelevance. Red Alert 2 is classic Command & Conquer's last hurrah. 

4. Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun

At the end of the original Command & Conquer a secret cutscene showed a GDI solider testing an advanced combat walker, teasing its sequel Tiberian Sun and Westwood's ambition to take its fledgling tanks and guns franchise into the realms of science fiction. Tiberian Sun spent a long time in development hell, not least due to Westwood's unfathomable decision to delay the series' transition to full 3D in favour of a pseudo-3D units on a 2D background half way house approach. Indeed, many a heavily doctored prerelease screenshot bears little resemblance to the finished product, which looks acceptable at a glance but doesn't really stand up to anything more than the most cursory scrutiny. The gameplay shone through, however, and the campaign in particular was fun and varied, giving the conflict between GDI and The Brotherhood of Nod a much needed personality injection. 

3. Command & Conquer: Generals

The first Commad & Conquer title not developed by Westwood Studios per se dragged a series that had traditionally kept real world conflict at arms length into the then newly declared  'war on terror', pitting the US and China against the terrorist GLA. Some truly reprehensible stereotyping was par for the course here, as the US units acknowledged your commands with declarations of unwavering patriotism, China had armies of computer hackers at their disposal as a source of income and the GLA employed the use of Anthrax suicide bombers and hijackers. Up until that point the series had been dragging its heels in a number of respects, but Generals righted these wrongs by adding a more streamlined economy, unit upgrades, active and passive abilities, multiple production queues and cloaked units. It also looked gorgeous at the time with fiery explosions and satisfying physics.

2. Command & Conquer: Red Alert

The conflict between GDI and The Brotherhood of Nod portrayed in the original Command & Conquer lacked personality and felt like little more than a pale metaphor for real war. Its sequel, Red Alert, righted this wrong by altering the setting to that of a sombre Cold War inspired conflict between the western Allies and the Soviet Union. Dodgey Soviet accents and fantasy units with an even dodgier basis in science such as weaponised Tesla Coils and time travelling Chronotanks gave the game a unique and appealing ambiance. Red Alert also offered increased strategic options over its predecessor, introducing sea and air units to the fray. Later titles in the Red Alert sub series took a u-turn in terms of tone, choosing to for some reason eschew the at least pseudo-serious tone of Red Alert in favour of garish cartoon colours, and other such ridiculousness as mind controlled giant squid and telekinetic schoolgirls. The original remains a fixed point in time, however, and the jumping on point for the vast majority of old school fans.

1. Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars

A controversial choice, I know. Tiberium Wars took the winning gameplay formula of Generals and added incredible atmosphere that betrayed the last truly great Command & Conquer title as a labour of love. The campaign was a revelation, the gameplay a pleasing mix of new and old and the extensive use of shaders and bloom effects made the game look amazing.  Nothing here was new, everything had been borrowed from either previous Command & Conquer games or its RTS contemporaries, but the game always felt like more than the sum of its parts. Tiberium Wars never made any real impact as an e-sport, despite EA's pretensions to the contrary, as both the poorly implemented economy and the fact that late game units were able to steamroll bases in seconds meant the game was not well suited to competitive play. That said, for single player or casual multiplayer, Command & Conquer simply does not get any better than this.

Interesting that two of the top three here were made with EA at the helm when so many series veterans still rue the day they took the reins. It has to be said, however, that their last two offerings have been sorely lacking; Red Alert 3 tried too hard to ape StarCraft's reliance on micromanagement and looked and felt like a Saturday morning cartoon, and Tiberian Twilight turned its back on the series' heritage in a vain attempt to present itself as a multiplayer focused arena battler, although I maintain that the latter did have the embryo of a good idea in there somewhere even if the execution was dire.