I hated writing this review. I hated playing this game. I hated thinking about playing this game because I had to write the review.

When people talk about strategy/RPG hybrids, I wonder how many of them mean a game like this where you need to play for hours and hours and hours just to see how the cool units and powers work? Do people who love RTS campaign stories wish that the skirmish game worked in the same way and only trickled stuff to you gradually?

This design decision breaks one of the rules of real time strategy design. Now this is not always a bad thing. A lot of great RTSes have come from breaking the rules. Majesty, for example. Sacrifice. You could argue that Starcraft 2‘s blatant disregard for anything that has happened in the genre over the last five years breaks rules.

But I hate the idea of unlocking things that I never used to have to unlock. I mentioned my displeasure at this sort of thing in my comments on Napoleon: Total War, too. There is always some level of unlocking in a strategy game, of course – tech trees and building upgrades – but these are confined to a single session. Age of Mythology doesn’t tell you that you can’t release the Kraken until you’ve spent a dozen hours killing smaller units in skirmish or multiplayer. And when the cooler units are locked away from you for this time period then you don’t get to see everything that a game as potentially great as C&C 4 has to offer.

The difference between this and RPGs is that RPGs are generally analogous to the RTS story campaigns. Power is tied to progress through a story and it will take time to see everything that the game wants to show you. You will get the strength you need when you need it.

I didn’t say a lot about the resource collection in C&C 4, mostly because the changes are a little baffling. For a war and series all about tiberium, sidelining it in favor of a basic population cap model (with some capture the tiberium flag type stuff for upgrades) strikes me as a bad move. It’s not that I miss harvesters and refineries as much as I think this is a step too far.

Anyway, I’m not as patient as Tom Chick is. He kept playing the game in spite of its problems. I think I’m done.