Kane's wrath

Command and Conquer 3: Kanes Wrath is a fun little expansion to Tiberium Wars. It features a new NOD campaign with 13 levels, new sub-factions with corresponding unique units, three faction specific epic units (and yes, they are epic), and a Global Conquest game mode.

The campaign is more of the same found in C&C3, although it is much shorter. The story is told from the NOD perspective, covering events before, during, and after the Tiberium Wars. The difficulty is slightly more challenging, since as an expansion it doesn't need to bother with any of the boring tutorial levels. It jumps right into the action. The game follows the same formulaic design of its predecessors, which means if you loved Tiberium Wars, you'll love Kanes Wrath. Joseph Kucan stars in yet another masterful reprisal of his role as Kane, with a supporting cast of cheesy actors, cheesy dialog, cheesy sets, in addition to laser beams, giant robots, explosions, high body counts, and nukes. What more could you ask for?

How bout some EPIC UNITS?!!?!?111!1 Each faction now gets to build a big, gigantic behemoth to rampage across the tiberium infested wastelands. Granted, they are huge moving targets that crawl along at a snail like pace and fire equally slowly. But they add another level of tactical depth to the game. They can be garrissoned with infantry, and have special abilities. Groovy! There are also two new sub factions for each of the three factions, for a total of six "new" factions. They each have strengths and weaknesses and represent tweaks to the original. I wasn't a big fan of them and preferred plain vanilla, but it was a nice touch on their part.

Probably the coolest part of this game is the new Global Conquest mode. Its gameplay style loosely analogous to Total War. Its essentially a turn based game played out on a huge strategic map of the world, with real time combat. The basic gist is that you have a huge long running campaign with tons of real time strategy combat missions. Each player takes turns building bases, upgrading shit, and fighting one another. Its innovative but a bit rough around the edges. For example, you can build bases anywhere on the map, which I feel detracts from the strategy involved. While this might work for a purely turn based game like Civilization, it doesn't for a mode that emulates Total War style of play. The problem is that all the RTS combat essentially all feels the same as a result. The maps are based on a set of templates. Once you've played on a few maps, you've literally played them all. If instead, there had been preset base locations that factions had to fight over, and each city had a certain layout, look and feel, it would have made every fight unique. All in all though, the new mode is sweet. You can upgrade your bases each turn, spending money to increase power plants, revenue, and so on. As bases get upgraded, they advance in tier, which allow them to create better units. Each base can create custom strike forces. These have a certain number of movement points per turn, which you can use to attack or defend. In addition, you can also call in air strikes / super weapon attacks /reinforcements and etc, and each of these has their own recharge timer. The mode is incredibly fun, has a lot of potential, and adds a lot of replay value. I was disappointed to see that it wasn't in Red Alert 3. Hopefully they keep it in future versions.