Command and Conquer: Generals is the seventh real time strategy installment in the Command and Conquer series which was released in early 2003.
Full Review
Command and Conquer: Generals Review
By, Nicholas Bale
Backdrop
.hack Part 1 Infection (Dot Hack) begins with a bang. Something disastrous happens to your character‘s real world friend, while innocently playing a 20 million-subscriber base, wildly popular online RPG game (MMORPG), The World. To unravel the mystery of your friend’s misfortune, you become an online, ingame rogue hacker, exploring every corner of The World, even some virus-infected ones.
The hero is armed with the special skills of Data Drain and Gate Hack, and some colorful, talented fellow adventurers to fill the two other available party slots. Different adventurers must accompany you depending on the plot‘s development. You have some control over the others in your party, including upgrading them through trades or gifts. You can play only a single class, Twin Blade. Other characters are from different classes, with varied strengths and weaknesses, from a mage type (Wavemaster) to a bully (Heavy Axeman).
Gameplay
Gameplay takes place in three principal areas – towns, fields, and dungeons. Towns house The World’s servers. There, the player can save the game, buy magic scrolls and useful and unique items, store items, buy equipment, and talk and trade with lots of other players in character online. One town has an unusual ranch to check out, a patent homage to an enduring feature of just about every Final Fantasy.
The town’s Chaos Gate provides instant teleportation to a particular wide-open Field, containing monster encounter hotspots, a mystical spring, treasure, and lots of mysterious food. You enter three distinct keywords, some known at the game‘s onset, and others learned through play. Whatever keywords are entered, the difficulty level of the destination is helpfully revealed. This prevents a low-level party from being massacred. Once the keywords are entered, you travel through the Chaos Gate. (You can enter specific keywords learned to continue the plot, do side quests, or do unlimited exploring. Or, you can instruct the Gate to enter random keywords, and take your chances. There‘s also an option to enter any keywords you wish from a word list.) Every Field houses a single Dungeon. The dungeons, where you spend much of the game fighting for your life, are not overly large in size, and always range between three and five average levels.
Many have compared Dot Hack to Phantasy Star Online Episode I and II (PSO) on the Gamecube. Let us gently discredit this. We feel Dot Hack has far better graphics than PSO. The Fields and Dungeons contain many colorful, over stylized backdrops and settings, including weather effects. Dot Hack’s monsters resemble the beautifully-drawn monsters of the later Final Fantasy’s. Dot Hack’s world is gigantic with a seeming infinite number of locations to explore. PSO’s world is relatively small, and plot is threadbare, with meaningless, though fun, side quests, which instill no enthusiasm in the player. Dot Hack’s plot is deep and complex, with each subplot advancing the story just a little bit further. (Remember though, the end of this game in no way comes close to wrapping up the story, to be completed in the three games to be released later this year.) One visual treat, however, was lifted directly from PSO – the cascading rings that accompany the teleportation of characters to and from different areas.
Combat
Dot Hack’s combat engine can best be described as modified real-time. Much like the action-RPG, Kingdom Hearts, button mashing can be effective to beat monsters. Monster combat icons appear as large yellow twirling landmarks. As you approach, the landmark dissolves, monsters come at you big-time, and, undoubtedly, players will feel a healthy adrenaline rush. Some of Dot Hack’s many monsters do not stand around waiting to be pummeled, rather some you need to catch. Dot Hack lets you turn combat almost into a turn-based affair. The player needs only to hit Triangle in the middle of battle to pause the game instantly. From there the player can give orders to the others in the party, anything from healing someone, reviving another, casting a spell, designating a target monster. Without jeopardizing your party from the hailstorm of monster blows, combat becomes a calmer, more strategic, experience. This will help the many action-challenged. Camera angles play a big role in successful combat. You must be facing a monster to do any damage. As in many games, manipulating opposing environmental elements, like fire vs. water, is a key to successful monster combat.
Dot Hack’s cyberspace setting provides a wealth of Wow-inducing outbursts. The Data Drain option in combat is a great example. When a monster’s approaches zero, the player can Data Drain to reduce a horrendous, gigantic steel robot, for example, into a sniveling, puny monster, easily defeated with a single blow. Data Drain always results in a nifty, rare item or essential Virus Cores so you can Gate Hack areas of The World now closed, but needing investigation. One bad side effect – if you defeat, a Data Drained monster, but a single experience point is earned. One REALLY bad side effect – if you Data Drain too often without giving the skill a rest, you may overload and explode. Game Over. In the case of Boss monsters, Data Drain works the same, but what remains is no sniveling puny monster, but a full-blooded slightly less tough monster. All of this makes for interesting and captivating combat, a large part of the game.
Fresh Features
Dot Hack is replete with new and interesting features that kept us riveted.
To start, the entire background and story of a real world gamer becoming a rascal hacker, penetrating deep into a virus-infected online game, is quite novel. Combine this with Dot Hack’s emulating the look and feel of an online game universe. (Message traffic on the web shows many gamers mistakenly believe Dot Hack is a real online MMORPG, along with monthly fees! No real Internet connection is required.)
Just like in the real word, Dot Hack replicates your excitement level when “New” appears before a popular forum or on your email screen. Some of the game involves receiving emails as the plot develops, as well as new, crucial information surfacing on The World’s Board. (Look out for emails challenging you to a strange game of Tag.) The online game world looks very familiar with a bunch of characters wandering around the game’s towns, with the ubiquitous balloon icons talking typical “trash” to each other, even criticizing “newbies“.
Combat grippingly called for surprisingly strategic decision-making to succeed, not related to the usual attack or defend choices. Do you go for experience and upgrade your character or try for some special equipment or a Virus Core, vital to Gate Hacking? The innovative control of other party members became second nature to us after some practice. The game rewards a player taking chances, like entering a Field or Dungeon rated 5 levels above the player’s current level. On the other hand, the game scoffed at players entering areas much lower rated the their current level, by awarding negligible experience points for victory.
Dot Hack takes progress reports to a new level, by slowly unlocking books that contain much in the way of statistics and information. There’s even a monster compendium with tips for defeating them.
Some might complain about the minimal “Save Game” ability, but we thrived on it. You explore a very hostile cyberspace environment without the facility to save. Only in a server-hosting town is saving possible at the local Recorder. We may be a solitary voice in the Wilderness, but we like this throwback to the good old RPG days. Those of you old enough to remember the Wizardry series, may recall those fingernail-biting multi-combat treks back to the Castle just to save the game. In case you’re really stuck deep in a dungeon, a common item will teleport you to the outdoor field, from where you can simply gate back to town from the command menu.
Many pieces of equipment come with distinctive powerful attack, healing, and status skills, essential to combat dominance. The player must tradeoff whether to equip something that will raise defense or offense or something less vigorous that lets you use a powerful skill. Trading is the most successful way to upgrade equipment.
In a first, Dot Hack comes with a 45 minute anime video. This gives some great background on what’s going on in The World, as well as provide clues for completing the game. In a nice twist, voiceovers for game speech can be set for Japanese or English presentation. Listening to the authentic Japanese voices really keeps you glued to the game.
Though some may scoff at what follows as meaningless, we liked the game’s unlocking of some nifty new “toys” to like, some only available when the game is cleared. You can unlock many different background music play lists. Tired of creepy tunes, just switch to something more upbeat, or futuristic. Just like real world gamers, who constantly change their desktop wallpaper, new and different wallpapers are unlocked along the way. Some are concept art of characters, while others are full blown anime renditions of the characters. This makes for great fun, and seems to pump additional energy into the game. As you progress over a dozen special cut scenes or movies will become viewable after defeating the game.
Though Dot Hack’s extras and new wrinkles enhance the RPG game experience, much of the gameplay will ring true to those who enjoy RPG‘s. Expect plenty of exploration in a huge 3D world, frequent monster combat, tons of treasure to earn and discover, upgrading your character’s weapons and armor, and needing to level before tackling pivotal story dungeons. The status screens for the characters and all equipment are well laid out and easy to grasp.
Time for Completion
Game length in hours always concerns many purchasers. A short RPG normally takes a lot of flack, and many online are asking about Dot Hack‘s time for completion. (Some have questioned whether Bandai should have released a single 80 hour game for $50, rather than four 20-hour games for $200 for a single story. This matter is beyond the scope of this review, but our high opinion of this game as a standalone is obvious.) Our experience, playing the plot without doing side quests or extra exploration, is in the 12 to 15-hour range. Players side-questing and extensively exploring, aside from the main plot, can expect to spend 25 hours to complete the game. You can even continue to advance your character, after game completion, to get a jump start on Part 2 due in May. In the next game, your character can be imported from Part 1.
Furthermore, imagine trying to explore every nook and cranny of the fields and dungeons accessible by a large number of 3-word combinations. Doing that would put the game in the 50-hour range, if not more. However, at a certain point, new items dry up, and a single experience point is earned for any defeated monster, no matter how tough.
Shortcomings
While, as is evident above, there is much to recommend in Dot Hack, certain concerns to varying degrees deserve mention.
From the “Why oh why did they leave this out?“ File. Pregame game board traffic and information about the Japanese version released months ago had many salivating for replaying the game in “parody” mode. This mode apparently converted all Dot Hack’s game world characters into satirical comedians. Sorry to say, this highly-anticipated feature is missing from the version released here.
The game requires massive amounts of button pressing. Every item or treasure uncovered from combat victories or exploration (opening chests, searching expired adventure remains, collecting food for Grunty’s, as examples) must be confirmed with a button press. When there could be 50-100 such occurrences in a single dungeon or field, over the course of the game, finger cramps seem inevitable. Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance also required lots of bashing for buried treasure and chests, but the items literally flew into your inventory, a much better way to handle this.
The manual is woefully terse and lacking in some crucial information and guidance. While the ingame tutorials fill in many of the gaps, one extremely important gameplay feature is missing from both the manual and tutorials – instructions on control your characters directly during combat.
Final Word
We got a kick out of Dot Hack. The feeling of “just one more dungeon” dominated our lives for the 3 days to completion. The engaging environment held our attention without much effort. The strategic nature of combat, plus the convoluted plot kept us going for hours on end. The constant unlocking of both frivolous and important gameplay features created a “what’s next” anticipation. Now, if I could only read Japanese better, Dot Hack Part 2 is already out in Japan!
Final Grade: B
|
After many games which have all used relatively the same engine, EA Pacific has decided to totally revamp the look of Command and Conquer. The result is Generals, a new kind of C&C RTS which is real eye-candy for anyone to play.
|
|
|
|
The first thing that strikes a player is the total change to 3D graphics. They’re just, simply put, beautiful. Every single detail has been put in, be it the small smoke trail from a fired rocket or the megaton explosion from a nuclear bomb (which, by the way, is just fantastic). The total revamp of these graphics has givenC&C a look which will surprise any veteran of the series, for gone is the traditional relic of the right-side command bar. Instead, the menu bar has been placed on the bottom, a more traditional location. The game is filled with spectacular effects, a particularly memorable one being when a dam is destroyed, for when the water pours out, it just looks great. Total eye-candy. All this comes at a price, however, and it takes a good computer to be able to run this game at its best. A pretty darn good one.
|
|
So what is the game itself like? Well, first of all, the mouse control just plain sucks. The mouse has remained in the archaic left-click format, unlike the standard right-click format which is used in almost all RTS’s today. The right click is less than useless, it is detrimental, for it will actually deselect the units! More than once I became extremely frustrated as I ordered units to retreat out of serious trouble and discovered that they had just been deselected. No problem, I’ll just select them again and…too late, they’re dead. If EA Pacific was going to stick with this old style, it could have at least added an option for it. Some simple keybinding would have helped tremendously.
|
|
|
|
As long as we’re talking about problems with the game, I might as well mention the AI. While it isn’t as terrible as Platoon (by terrible I mean nonexistent), it does have its flaws. For one, it suffers the common problem of not being able to acknowledge its own side’s existence. What this means is that, while two of your tanks are standing side by side, as long as the enemy stays out of one tank’s sight range, they can bomb the hell out of the first tank, while the second will sit idly by, waiting for its turn to be blown to bits. Having said that, the rest of the AI is regular fare, however sometimes it seems that there are lapses in the ‘I’ part of AI. For example, the attack-move command will destroy any enemies encountered, but will walk right by buildings. Frustrating at times, but no biggie.
|
|
Within the game there are three sides to choose from. There is the technologically-superior USA, the heavily-armored China, and the low-tech-low-cost Global Liberation Army. Between these three factions the gameplay is surprisingly balanced, and each side has an answer to the other sides’ weapons and units…most of the time. However, don’t get me wrong. This is no USA-has-big-tank-China-has-big-infantry. There are some serious differences between the three. For instance, the GLA is the only side that operates without any power plants whatsoever. They need no power at all, but sacrifice all air power for it. The USA side has high-tech and the best air power, but the costs are much higher than any other side.
|
|
|
|
Time to talk about gameplay. Like I said before, the game is totally different from the old C&C series. The old build-at-the-right-menu-bar system is gone, and now units are queued directly from the buildings they are built from, which makes multi-base building an easy possibility. Also, the old engineer rushes of the past are gone, eliminating a cheap alternative to actual fighting. OF course, that is not to say that cheap elements are gone from the game. There is a unit on the GLA’s side that is basically a band of rebels. Okay, they don’t sound too powerful, right? Arm them with AK-47s. Now you have a unit that can take out a base. I kid you not. Build two or three of these, and not a single unit can oppose you. Hell, an entire defense force can’t oppose you. The moment I was able to buy these things I made about six of them and wiped out seven opponents easily.
|
|
One of the most innovative new elements in the game is the addition of an RPG style of play (and here you were thinking “Why is this game on Just-RPG?” ). You are an actual general, and through combat, you gain levels. These levels earn you points, and the more levels you gain, the higher tier of upgrades (which cost points) you can reach. The fifth level is when you can reach the third tier where each side’s super-weapon resides. For China, it’s the nuclear bomb (mentioned above as having some damn spectacular effects), for the USA it’s the infamous Daisy Bomb, and for the GLA is it the chemical everyone has loved to fear, a big payload of Anthrax which does low damage to buildings but will kill every unit instantly. Nothing says fun like that. In addition to the super-weapons, the perks of each side are interesting as well. To name one, the GLA has an upgrade which allows you to earn a bounty on each unit and building you kill/destroy. This provided an alternate source of income which was quite substantial.
|
|
|
|
Speaking of incomes, EA Pacific has decided to stay with the old C&C resources: set oil wells are scattered across the map, and another resource is randomly scattered in different areas. While this has worked relatively well before, and still works well now, there are some serious problems. For one, the oil wells can be destroyed, quite easily, and do not return. Likewise, the other resource can run out eventually. I suppose the programmers never really thought about what could happen when both sides just don’t have any more units to throw at each other. I’ve heard of multiplayer matches that have ended in stalemates, or just really slowed because it takes so damn long to earn resources other ways. The GLA does rectify that by having the whole bounty thing, but I say again, there are only so many things to destroy before you run out of bounties to get.
|
|
As opposed to the rest of the games, there is very little story within C&C: Generals. Oh of course, there is the obligatory scenario – The GLA wants to take over the world, China doesn’t want them to, but motives are unclear, and the USA, full of democratic patriotism, is out to stop these terrorists. It’s basically a caricature of what we are seeing on the news today. After that, there isn’t much else. There is no connection between each mission, no binding glue. There is a piddly little briefing which sets up the situation, but not much else. In a series which was famous for its movies (with such actors as James Earl Jones), there are none in this one. Odd.
|
|
|
|
When you get down through all the nitty-gritty and little problems that plague this game, in the end, it is an excellent RTS.
|
