CnC: Tiberium Alliances Review

After the release of the final chapter in the saga of Kane was met with a lukewarm reception in 2010, you’d think that EA would finally be content to put their hallowed RTS series to rest. The last thing you’d expect would be for them to release…a free-to-play browser game called Command & Conquer: Tiberium Alliances? But that’s exactly what they’ve done, turning the epic struggle between the fanatics of Kane’s Brotherhood of Nod and the stalwart Global Defense Initiative into a tame and altogether uninspiring empire builder that’s more in the vein of Facebook games like Mafia Wars than anything you’d expect from one of the progenitors of the RTS genre.

TA combat

Stomping the Forgotten has never been this boring

There are few characters quite like Kane in video games; even if he was an evil mastermind, he was a mysterious, charismatic, even kind of charming (in the most straight way possible) evil mastermind. It was his appearance in those campy FMV cutscenes that gave the CnC Tiberium series a lot of its appeal. No matter how many times he got incinerated by an ion cannon, Kane would always find a way to come back and give the player a compelling reason to step back into the old GDI commander’s uniform and save the world once again. Not so in Tiberium Alliances; the game is ostensibly set in the Tiberium universe, but it’s a pretty poor use of the license. The choice of GDI versus Nod seems to be more an aesthetic choice, as the units and buildings are pretty much the same, and you can ally with whomever you choose, regardless of their faction. There are neither characters nor a story in Tiberium Alliances: the only objective of the game is to control the center of the map, which is home to dozens of Forgotten bases that simply sit there, waiting to be obliterated by human players.

And if you like waiting, you’ll love this game. I’m not talking about five minute loading screens; I mean waiting for Half-life Episode 3 waiting. You spend a lot of time twiddling your thumbs (which I guess is standard for these types of games) and waiting to accumulate command points to make an attack, or research points to upgrade and buy new units and buildings, or tiberium and crystal resources to upgrade and buy buildings and units that you’ve already researched. Most resources require you to click on the production building to collect packages of resources, which I found to be an incredibly pointless chore; the mechanic is basically designed to reward players who spend more time on the game, because your buildings can only store a certain number of packages at a time, after which any further resource packages gathered are lost. Production buildings do collect resources continuously at a lesser rate, but if you don’t check your base for a few days, or even for a few hours, you’re going to find yourself hopelessly outpaced by your opponents.

The game takes place on a few screens: a world map, a base screen, and an attack screen. You’ll spend most of your time looking at your base, and base construction is one of the more interesting parts of the game. Since you can only have a limited number of buildings, you’ll have to plan out your base very carefully to optimize resource production. You can also buy units for your defense and offense screens in the base menus. However, attacking itself never approaches anything close to exciting; you simply line up your offensive units in a set of predetermined lanes and waves, and hope that they make it past the enemy defenses to wreak havoc on their base. It can be a challenge to figure out the proper placement of your troops to defeat enemy waves, but watching your troops supposedly battle their way across difficult terrain and through withering enemy fire is not much more exciting than watching grass grow and just about as slow; it’s a good thing that you can close the battle window if you don’t want to watch the entire battle play out. I can’t count the number of times that my soldiers have arrived at the enemy construction yard, only to leave it standing with barely a sliver of health left and forcing me to waste command points to finish the base off.

Luckily, there’s PvP to liven things up, right? But nope, even that’s not really anything to get excited about. As the title suggests, you can form alliances with other players for mutual support on both defense and offense. It’s not much to get excited about though; all you’re going to be doing is moving around bases and attacking one after another, just as you do versus the computer bases. Cracking a particularly tough defense can be rewarding, but doing it over and over again is a recipe to serious monotony.

TA menus

Menus, menus, and more menus

Tiberium games are a little on the subdued side in the visual department compared to, say, Red Alert, but they’ve always been extremely competent graphics-wise. However, the graphics have not made a smooth transition to the browser game; there is very little catch to your eye either in the art or technical department. The animations aren’t very exciting, and the little pixelated sprites that represent your units and buildings just don’t look very good. Neither is the audio very interesting; the single track of BGM that keeps looping is pretty generic and unobtrusive, and the various sound effects in battle are plain but serviceable. For some reason, even though this is a browser game, it runs quite poorly; my quad-core rig kept chugging for several seconds simply opening a menu, which doesn’t sound like a lot, until you consider that a large part of this game revolves around opening menu screens. This is just plain bad optimization, and pretty inexcusable for something which doesn’t require much computational power for, well, anything.

The interface for Tiberium Alliances is pretty clunky; while there is a tutorial, it does a terrible job of explaining things. It can take a while to get used to the array of menus and tabs presented on the screen, and it feels like a lot of it could and  should have been simplified. For example, why would you have to dig through a bunch of menus just to find where your allies’ bases are? There’s absolutely no mini-map and no way to jump quickly to a location, even when you know its coordinates. Considering that the world map is 1000 by 1000 square units, it can get really irritating to have to click and drag your way around.

Unless you worship Tiberium as the pathway to ascension, and even then, there’s no compelling reason to play Tiberium Alliances. The presentation is awful, the gameplay is slow and monotonous, and the original license material is all but thrown by the wayside. On a side note, TA may be free to play, but there are little buttons scattered all over the interface urging you to toss out a few bucks for gameplay and resource advantages; here’s hoping that EA’s next entry in the storied Command and Conquer franchise isn’t just a throwaway cash grab, and actually lives up to the legacy of its predecessors.

Overall Ratings –
C&C Tiberium Alliances (PC/Mac Web Browser)

Gameplay:

4/10

Graphics:

4/10

Sound:

6/10

Presentation:

3/10

OVERALL SCORE:

43%

"Dead Fish" Award Winner
This game is such a stinker, it’s won the dubious Dead Fish Award. Watch "The Godfather" if you don’t get the reference.
Dustin Liaw

Dustin Liaw

Contributor at Gaming Illustrated
A polymath in every sense except for that of reality, Dustin Liaw is a historian, critic, writer, musician, poet, dreamer, scientist, programmer, linguist, bureaucrat, and all-around geek who happens to enjoy tabletop RPGs, anime, and video games in his spare time.
Dustin Liaw

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  • Christopher

    True, never understood why TA was even liked by people.
    It doesn’t fit in my style. Heck, only the alliance thing keeps it alive and probably the main or only reason why the game is actually still being played.