Now Playing: Tiberian Twilight

I’d heard the final Command & Conquer game – Tiberian Twilight – was bad. I didn’t expect it to be this bad. There’s no pretty way to put this. Tiberian Twilight is f**king garbage. It’s one of the worst games I’ve ever played.

I’ve never reviewed a game I didn’t finish, but I’m making an exception in this case. I made it through the opening missions of the GDI and NOD campaigns, but after only a few short hours, I’d seen enough. I had to stop. I closed the game and immediately uninstalled. All I could think was ‘what the f**k did I just play?’

Visually, Tiberian Twilight is a complete mess and easily the worst looking C&C game. The environments are sparse and bland, and the units look utterly terrible. They’re ugly and their animations are wonky as shit. Audio isn’t any better, with irritating music that you’ll rapidly be sick of. I knew something wasn’t right when I entered the settings menu and realised there was no option to rebind keys. How did this happen? Who thought this would be a good idea?

In terms of gameplay, Tiberian Twilight is dull, annoying, poorly balanced and the complete opposite of fun. Base building has been almost entirely stripped from the game. You now control a single MCV responsible for all unit and (very limited) building construction. The MCV comes in three types – Assault, Defence and Support – each of which grant access to a unique (and small) selection of units.

Whilst it’s possible to ‘delete’ your existing MCV and swap it for another of a different type, there’s little point in doing so due to the utterly baffling decision to introduce extremely restrictive unit limits. Every unit costs a varying number of command points, and there’s no way to increase these command points as you play. As a result, you’ll only ever be controlling 8-12 units at a time if you want a couple of higher tier units on the battlefield.

Combine these limits with units being locked behind the three different MCV options and you have what it may be the most tactically restrictive and boring ‘RTS’ game ever made. Why did they include these limits? What purpose do they serve?

Why not let us earn more command points as we play by capturing key structures – allowing us to expand our forces and introducing a new form of map control to the series? That would have made some kind of sense, even if it was a break from the more traditional RTS structure of previous C&C titles.

Why not allow us to call down multiple MCVs so we can mix unit types? There’s many ways that Tiberian Twilight could be ‘fixed’ into a somewhat competent title – perhaps not a traditional RTS, more a basic RTT. Instead, it doesn’t succeed at being either. It’s a complete failure on every level.

Missions are (at least the ones I played before I gave up) so simple yet so tedious. Some I completed in a matter of minutes to my utter confusion, whilst others dragged endlessly on as I slowly whittled the enemy down with my tiny unit squads. To say the game feels half-assed and unfinished would be an understatement.

The game is so poorly balanced that it’s a complete joke. There’s no strategy at play here. No resource collection either – you can just keep spamming units every time your command level drops. Oh, and unit path finding is also f**king terrible which makes units a nightmare to control.

If it isn’t entirely obvious, I absolutely hated what I played of Tiberian Twilight. It’s very, very rare that I’ll just give up on a game, especially after only a few short hours. But it really is that bad. I’m just going to pretend it never happened. I was going to play and review Command & Conquer: Generals alongside Twilight, but after this shit show, I’m totally burned out on RTS. Maybe in the future.

2/10