Preview Friv Game: Command & Conquer 4 - Tiberian Twilight

For strategy lovers IgroMir turned out to be quite good. You could personally feel the two most important RTS of the next year - StarCraft 2 and Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight. But if we already know almost everything about the first project, then the second only has to be dealt with.

Friv5Online Games Studio in the fourth part decided to put an end to the whole epic around Tiberius. For the last time, we will be able to enjoy the glow of green crystals and Kane's adorable smirk. But while he is still alive, while he smiles and lets out sunbeams with his bald head, he continues to amaze us.

In the fourth part, it turns out that Kane decided not to enslave the planet, but to save it from the wildly growing Tiberium. And for this, the leader of NOD even made peace with the GDI. The great confrontation is over! Now two alliances together cleanse the planet from the "green plague".

However, fifteen years after the conclusion of peace, another war begins. Friends quarreled and again want to bring all the inhabitants of the "green ball" to their knees. The reasons for the disagreements are still unknown. And they will not reveal this secret to us until the release of Tiberian Twilight, the developers decided to intrigue. They promise that the plot of the fourth part will be deeper and more interesting. And Friv5Online Games Studio will give up inserts where the actor is just talking to the camera. In 2010, there will be no more solid static pictures, they are going to show us something like a real film. Moreover, the player will become an active person and will begin to take part in productions.

Perhaps all this will resemble the opening video of the Soviet campaign in Red Alert 3... There is a time machine, and the murder of Einstein , and an attack by the allies. It looked expensive, it looked interesting. So if Tiberian Twilight goes the same way, it will only be good. And how much can you use the old boring trick. I was amazed by it at Dune, but I was 10 years old then...

Honestly, the influence of Red Alert 3 on the fourth part of Command & Conquer is noticeably stronger than, perhaps, even we would like. Still, these are two different series, but now they have more and more in common.

So in Tiberian Twilight they will disappear... Wait, a question to fill in: what can disappear from C&C? Fields of Tiberius! That's it, there are no more harvesters who roll slowly, lazily collect crystals and take them to processing stations for a long time. Everything is easier now. There is a mine, like in Red Alert 3, an enrichment plant is being built near it, and money seems to be pumped out of the deposits.

The system is, of course, two-edged. On the one hand, battles become more dynamic, you don't have to bother with finding fields, you don't have to be constantly distracted by protecting the harvester, and you don't have to wait for anything. But on the other hand, what the whole C&C series has been living with for how many years is lost . And in general - these are the basics of RTS ...

But here we must, apparently, talk about our personal conversation with the developers from EA . As they told us themselves, they do not want to go back. They are interested in developing a project, making it different. And move away from the classic understanding of RTS. So if StarCraft 2 is a textbook strategy, then C&C 4 is a pure innovator. Old ideas aside, you give more interesting and hitherto unrealized chips!

So the class system appeared in the Friv game. But we are not pumping fighters (this is already quite standard), but we ourselves find a role for ourselves. There are three types of classes in total. The first is the attacker. If you choose him, you will get access to different ground troops - fast, mobile, strong. Another option is protective. If you play it, you can build defensive towers. The third is support. He specializes in aviation and knows how to deliver soldiers quickly to any point on the map.

As the battle progresses, you increase both the level of soldiers and your own. You get access to new units, you unlock technologies. But if everything does not go as planned, then you can always change the specialization. However, we must remember that this will entail some fines. For example, losing all your money and more.

We said above that only the defensive class knows how to build defensive towers. And it's not a joke. Others cannot defend their base in any way, because... There is no such thing as a "base" now. There is only a mobile assembly shop, which the soldier produces. They can be born in the middle of a hot battle. Moreover, the selected class also determines the appearance of this "main robot". The attacking player will have it ride on the ground and it will be possible to hang guns on it, and the "support" uses the plane to create soldiers.

Now C&C 4 can hardly be called a real-time strategy. This seems to be a completely different genre. Something similar to Dawn of War 2 . There is no construction, resource extraction is simplified, and it all comes down to the main thing - battles. And you have to fight almost immediately, from the first seconds.

Well, we continue to be surprised? Here's another piece of news - now the recruitment of your troops depends on how many opponents you killed and how much experience you gained. And not in one battle, but in general - for the entire time that you have been playing C&C 4 . And this applies not only to the campaign, but even to the online mode.

Imagine: you find yourself in a battle, fight, everything goes quite standard, and then the enemy pulls up some completely unknown soldiers. Some kind of devilry, isn't it?

But the developers say that the troops that you get at high account levels are not stronger than normal ones. They are just different. And the pumped player has just a great variety of tactics. It is more frivolous for him to fight, but he is not stronger. Now something similar is happening inModern Warfare 2. Initially, you have one gun of each class, but if you shoot a little longer, you will get new copies. It's great, but it greatly undermines the esports component of the project. But the Command & Conquer series has long been on the pedestal of the best networked strategies.

However, not only the players, but also the soldiers themselves, grow in levels here. And not as boring as it was in Red Alert 3 . If you remember, there the new "ranks" simply allowed the fighters to inflict more serious damage. Here, the heroes will develop like Dawn of War . That is, new skills, guns and more are waiting for us. This is another step forward for the series, but it is definitely a blessing. The genre of such chips is greatly lacking.

Well, one more good news for those who love network mode: from now on, we will no longer wait half an hour for the server to find us a worthy opponent. And you no longer have to register on third-party resources in order to participate in competitions. EA will completely overhaul everything about the outside of multiplayer. And now all information about all users will be available from the C&C client , you will not have to go to the official website of the project for it.

While, of course, it is too early to say what exactly will be in the final, and whether we like the Friv game or not. Only one thing is clear - the fourth part has practically nothing to do with the Command & Conquer series . Only the old alliances remained, the spirit of Tiberius and Kane himself in the lead role. Otherwise, there are as many similarities as between the first part of Dawn of War and the second. One universe, but completely different projects.

Is this good or bad? Probably, after all, we will call it a blessing. You can't do the same thing year after year. And lately, things are going to the point that RTS should die. Because tactics in real time are much more dynamic, interesting and lively. World in Conflict, Battleforge, Dawn of War, Demigod - they all took innovation, laughed at the old canons, and the players encouraged them for their insolence. So the C&C series went the surest way possible.

But this will not relieve her of the likely disadvantages. It is not yet entirely clear whether there will really be a serious imbalance between players at different levels. If one "duelist" is at the very beginning a priori stronger - this is a nightmare and wrong. It is also known that in five-on-five battles it will be possible to connect during the battle and somehow influence the battles. It sounds nice, but will the developers be able to adequately implement it? Will it be like World in Conflict, or will EA come up with something of its own?

And the last thing is, of course, the engine. When on the basis of StarCraft 2 you can make a third-person action movie, C&C 4 works on the old man from Red Alert 3. But the graphics of the "Red Threat" were not impressive even last year; everything was drawn beautifully, but from a purely technological side - everything is bad.

Here are the things. First, Kane returned after a long hibernation, and now he is going to leave and before that he wants to loudly slam the door. And either it will be a failure, or we will get a new eSports discipline in a new eSports genre - real time tactics. Why is there no third way? Well, do you yourself imagine a project called Command & Conquer 4?