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Game Review: ‘Command and Conquer 3: Kane’s Wrath’

“Command and Conquer 3: Kane’s Wrath” is a nice break from first-person shooters in that it enables you to wreak much more destruction from a much greater distance. There’s nothing drastically new about this latest version of the famous God’s-eye-view strategy war game, but there are enough neat touches to make it worth a spin.

In the game, you play as a general in the resource wars of tomorrow, when rival factions are competing for the Earth’s finite supply of tiberium, the precious crystal power source that fuels the economies and war machines of the future. Tiberium has been the subject of many editions of the “Command and Conquer” franchise; perhaps no precious mineral has been in so much demand since Daffy Duck battled Marvin the Martian over the last veins of Illudium Phosdex, the shaving cream atom.

Powered by tiberium, you build barracks for your troops, factories for your armor and aerodromes for your aircraft, then set your war machines to destroy the other forces vying for the precious, precious crystals. Having been away from total-world games like this since playing “Sim City 2000” when I was a kid, I was amazed at the detail of each little unit on the battlefield — individual soldiers seemed to have a unique march and fighting style. When your little men win, they jump and high-five each other; when they lose, they writhe around before lying still.

“Command and Conquer” has a long-standing tradition of including video cut-scenes to advance the story, and in “Kane’s Wrath” you get a lot of live-action pronouncements from the eponymous villain. I’d be lying if I said these weren’t really stupid; the chrome-domed, goateed Kane looks like a character you’d see in the lowest-budget original series on the Sci-Fi Channel. Maybe that’s the point: Watching his pseudo-biblical video pronouncements, all you’ll think about is building an army big enough to shut him up.

Game Review