izigame.me

This was loathed on release and where some games actually redeem themselves with time and effort or just don't feel as controversial in retrospective, this one still sucks, to this day.
For starters, to start *enjoying* this, you need to login with your Origin or whatever EA has to this day, twice, first in launcher, then ingame. Next up, you'll be met with music and cinematics whose tone doesn't match previous CnC games at all but does match the EA's executives at the time ideas of what people would like, the faction conflict of GDI and Nod is being diluted by personal drama of main character who gets to loose a wife that previously showed up for ten seconds but she's a woman saying a nice thing in your face so I guess gamers will forever remember her, and then troopers you serve with get pretty emotional too except the actors aren't the best at it so it comes off goofy and pathosy, and the forst first person perspective with neural network UIs is just over the top with it's flashyness. The art direction in particular seems very influenced by at that time EA's most successful Mass Effect series, you can see it in UI in particular. Music is also way more orchestral and pompastic than anything ever delivered by Frank Klepacki.
Now, the gameplay, it gets a lot of hate. I must say, but as a team-based, online RTS with focus on dynamic shift of frontlines and no preset bases it's kinda sound, conceptually, plus three distinct types of "crawlers" the mobile bases in a single unit, with one being able to push trough with best armored unit, another getting to deploy defenses and infantry that can garrison structures, and yet third getting mostly aerial units and special abilities. It feels kinda like a sci-fi take on World in Conflict, more gamey, but with defined player roles and sides constantly harassing and pressuring each-other. Problem is, the online scene never lasted with how badly this game was received, there's this absolutely insulting grinfingg mechanic where you need to complete missions, skirmishes or online battles to unlock new units, not as some alternative loadouts but as part of core progress, demanding many more games to be played than just going trough a campaign, and all unified for both online and single play, and finally, this gameplay just doesn't translate to as very enjoyable experience in singleplayer, you get to have a small, very modest array of like 8 to 16 combat units at a time, there's some situational additions like husks of wrecked heavy units like in CnC4 to capture if you can afford engineers for it, but ultimately you're just pumping samey units and treating it all like some micro-intensive small squad breaktrough thing even though your units don't have any micro-intensive abilities or benefit from taking cover or something, plus unless necessity dictates you need to defend a single point or need to cover impassable terran with aerial units, you'll be playing all missions with Offensive crawler, so you won't use the free occupyable structures the game has, nor will you be using special ability most of time - and since you'll often deal with more numerous enemy forces that replenish as fast as you, it usually all boils down to building the exact units that counter enemy's forces, collecting veterancy upgrades dropped by enemies, and keep pumping reinforcements while hoping you can hold up. Even repairs don't feel worth it when performed by your easy to destroy engineers, takes too long, so you're better off ordering new units that microing back for repairs, and let me tell you clicking one or two unit buttons endless is a downgrade for CC, going way back to tank spam days.
And going back to presentation, I must say levels look pretty nice, the supermassive industrial construction sites and futuristic green cities make for nice arenas, but the structures and units you get? They range from way more toyetic takes on something you've seen in CnC3 or even earlier games, to genuinely embarrassing, goofy designs. The developers had to even replace the pre-release Nod engineer because it looked like a goofy cartoon worm with a jetpack - and yet, many other designs in this one could have used similar reworks back in the day. And the story? Yeah, Command and Conquer cinematics always felt cheap and hard to take seriously but this one really feels like a new low with team just filming "citizen interviews" with dev team members on streets of LA, blatantly modern day LA without a single postprocessed-in thing all while ingame cities look radically different from modern urban environments. Oh and the very last cinematic is just a white void.
People say this one killed the CnC series and harmed the RTS as a genre for years. I agree. I don't think it's worth your time, if you grabbed the CnC collection you should have a whole load of great games, don't hesitate to pass on this one even if you're a true penny pincher.