Command & Conquer: Generals Reviews

If I had to choose just one video game to play for the rest of my life and I wasn't allowed to play anything else, I would choose Generals. For the past 15 or so years, this game has been a huge source of enjoyment for me, due to its huge amount various units, buildings, usable strategies, and playable factions. Probably the best aspect about Generals is the huge amount of community content available for the game. People in the community make modifications for it in order to alter the way it plays, add new teams and vehicles, among other things. Because of this, I will not be talking about mods such as Shockwave or Rise of the Reds in this review. They're too different. I consider those things to be completely separate games in their own right. As for the base game itself (with no add ons), the first thing Command and Conquer fans probably noticed about Generals when playing it for the first time in 2003 is how radically different it is from previous games in this series. Whereas the previous C&C games got almost universal praise among fans, Generals was seen as something of a mixed bag. Previous installments such as Red Alerts 1 and 2 and Tiberian Sun had a varied, but well established formula: the Red Alert subseries of Command and Conquer focused on an alternate timeline where Einstein travels back in time and kills Hitler before he even has a chance to rise to power, therefore getting rid of world war 2 up until a certain point, where the USSR suddenly becomes aggressive and decides to take over europe. The Tiberian games focused on an entirely separate timeline from Red Alert, set in the near future (2030s) where a highly dangerous and toxic chemical substance called Tiberium crash lands on earth and starts spreading rapidly. A powerful military organization called the GDI (Global Defense Initiative) fights the Brotherhood of Nod in the depressing environment of a dying planet earth, and Nod, under their leader, Kane, tries to use the spread of Tiberium to their advantage to basically destroy the world. These two games have surprisingly depressing and dark storylines, but both the Red Alert and Tiberium games were always rooted in fiction. You can tell the actors involved had a lot of fun with them, and the games aren't really meant to be taken seriously. After all, in Red Alert 2, the Russians gain access to ridiculous weapons like armored blimps and giant squids that are mind-controlled to attack enemy warships. Getting back to Generals, lots of people who were fans of Command and Conquer didn't even like the game back then, seeing as how it is so drastically different from its predecessors. Generals is the first Command and Conquer game to go fully 3 dimensional, whereas all the games up to this one were 2D isometric. Not only this, but the premise of the game itself drew heavy criticism from Tiberium and Red Alert fans, as not only did Generals not look like a C&C game, it didn't feel like one either. The game follows a storyline that is much closer to real life than its predecessors. The silly, nonsensical attitude of the older games is gone. Generals is about two global superpowers (the US and China) and their attempted efforts to root out and destroy the Global Liberation Army: a terrorist organization backed by a huge but unknown network of funders. The GLA is a ruthless and violent faction. They bear the least sophisticated equipment in the game, and most of their vehicles and weapons are old, decrepit, and abandoned by the armies they used to serve. Because the GLA is badly suited for head on, one-on-one battles, they tend to favor sneaky and underhanded tactics such as stealth, fast speed, and hitting their opponents from where they're not expecting. As the USA and Chinese battle their way across central Asia and the Middle East, the GLA fights them all the way and always has more surprises ready for them. After seeing how close to real life Generals' story mode is, it's not really surprising that many people at the time didn't like the game. The game's plot hit a little too close to home for 2003, due to the then imminent war in Iraq, and the GLA bearing a strong resemblance to al-Qaeda. Due to its similarities to real life conflicts and terrorist groups, the game was banned in several countries, including germany. This doesn't detract from the huge amount of fun you will have playing it, however. As mentioned before, Generals has 3 teams vying for supremacy over the battlefields: the USA, China, and the GLA. Each team has different strategies and tactics that make them unique and more interesting to play as. Surprisingly, my favorite team is probably China as they get the heaviest, most powerful tanks and armored vehicles. The downside is that they're slow and expensive, but the costs can be made more reasonable by purchasing vehicles like gatling tanks, which easily shred hostile planes and helicopters. China also possesses the strongest artillery units in the game, namely, the nuke cannon, a huge but thinly armored field gun that lobs extremely powerful atomic shells over long ranges. China also makes extensive use of EMP technology, allowing them to call in planes to drop electromagnetic bombs anywhere in order to freeze entire vehicle formations in their tracks. The US team is arguably the strongest overall, and gets a lot of "click to destroy" abilities that can level an enemy base in seconds, such as the fuel air bomb, a-10 airstrike, and spectre gunship; a large plane that circles an area of the map and pummels everything below it with machine guns and explosive rounds. America also possesses lots of units that are as powerful as they are versatile. The humble Humvee is a weakly armored jeep mounted with a machine gun, but becomes one of the most unfair units in the game when loaded with a squad of missile soldiers. The Paladin is a robust heavy tank with substantial amounts of armor plating and even a laser that zaps enemy missiles out of existence. It should also go without saying that America also possesses the strongest air force in the game, with formidable Raptor jet fighters taking down enemy artillery units or hostile planes with ease. Lastly, we have the GLA, which is in many ways the most fun team to play as, and not only because they're the bad guys. The GLA team is designed with speed and aggression in mind, and are therefore stronger than the USA (and especially China) early in a match. GLA forces, being native to the deserts of the Middle East, do not require any type of electricity, unlike the other factions. As I said before, the downside to using the GLA is that they are underpowered. Their vehicles are very easy to kill if caught in the open, and a head on fight will almost always result in them being defeated. This means GLA commanders will have to rely on such technology as the GPS scrambler (which turns vehicles invisible) and tunnel networks in order to turn the tide of a fight. The team also has another big downside in the fact that they possess absolutely no air force, save for a large cargo plane that comes in to drop bombs loaded with dangerous illnesses (such as anthrax) on enemies. Lastly, I think I should comment on one of my favorite aspects about this game, which are the superweapons. Superweapons were featured in previous Command and Conquer games, but it wasn't until Generals when the concept really took off. You can build as many as you want, as long as you have enough electricity and money to do so. The superweapons for the 3 teams are the Particle Cannon, Scud Storm, and Nuclear Missile for USA, GLA, and China, respectively. The particle cannon is ironically the weakest, as it just fires a laser beam into space which bounces off an orbiting mirror and allows you to incinerate ground targets. I say it's the worst because the beam moves very slowly and doesn't do widespread area damage, the USA favoring precision weapons that minimize casualties. The nuclear missile is exactly what you would expect. It smashes down onto a target area, pieces of buildings and vehicles go flying everywhere, and it's just glorious destruction. It also leaves dangerous radiation at its explosion point for a while. The last (and probably best) superweapon is the GLA's scud storm, which launches a group of 9 anthrax-filled scud missiles wherever you want. The scud storm is the most overpowered superweapon because it hits the target multiple times, has a decent recharge timer (5 minutes), and leaves poisonous clouds of toxins on the target. I know this has been a really long review, but I could have gone on much longer. Generals means that much to me and to the world of strategy games. I know it wasn't really respected upon its release, so I hope that more people realize they made a really big mistake by passing it up, especially because the later C&C games are just pure garbage. I understand that this game is much different from the previous ones and takes a more realistic approach to things, but that is probably why it's my pick for my favorite game of all time. The only bad thing I can say about it is how the music is not as good as the previous games, mainly because Frank Klepacki (who did the soundtracks for the others) did not do the soundtrack for Generals.