What is... Command & Conquer™ Remastered?
9Command & Conquer™ Remastered is finally here, developed by Petroglyph Studios (Grey Goo (2015), 8-Bit Armies (2016)), former Westwood Studio developers and published by Electronic Arts. It's so close to being the perfect return of Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert, but juuust not quite there. Here's a basic overview of Tiberian Dawn (which translates identically to Red Alert and their expansions), what I like, and what I dislike about it.
Find Command & Conquer™ Remastered ($26.99CAD or your regional equivalent).
Steam (Non-affiliated): https://store.steampowered.com/app/1213210/Command__Conquer_Remastered_Collection/
Origin (Non-affiliated): https://www.origin.com/can/en-us/store/command-and-conquer/command-and-conquer-remastered
PC Specs: https://www.youtube.com/user/Akabane101/about
What is... Command & Conquer™ Remastered?
A full remaster of the music by Frank Klepacki, sound and visuals of the classic 1995 and 1996 releases of "Command & Conquer™ Tiberian Dawn", "Command & Conquer™: Red Alert", and their expansions, "Command & Conquer™ Covert Ops", "Command & Conquer™: Counter Strike", and "Command & Conquer™ The Aftermath". Featuring a 4K resolution, upscaled cutscenes including ones from the original PlayStation 1 release, complete with smoothed out framerates, playable on modern hardware with "modern" gameplay mechanics and updates. Lastly, the ability to go from original art to remastered artstyles on the fly in-game, but NOT for cutscenes.
Check out OpenRA (Non-Affiliated): https://www.openra.net/
Timestamps
0:00 INTRODUCTION
1:10 OPTIONS [General]
2:46 OPTIONS [Graphics]
4:18 OPTIONS [Audio]
5:25 OPTIONS [Bindings]
7:41 OPTIONS [Mods]
8:56 BONUS GALLERY
9:46 START NEW GAME [Cutscene Upscaling Example]
12:56 GAMEPLAY (GDI Campaign MISSION 1)
16:37 Raw Cutscene (No Commentary)
17:24 JUKEBOX
18:30 SKIRMISH (Lobby Menus Showcase)
22:48 REPLAY / OBSERVER (Menu)
23:30 REPLAY / OBSERVER MODE (Gameplay)
26:15 Overall Thoughts / Final Thoughts
Overall, visually, the game is gorgeous. The new 4K art visually revitalizes the game without taking away from the original design. The variety of keybinds is incredible, buuut, they are let down by the fact the game doesn't allow a more modernized command bar. The current command bar expands as more buildings are created, much like the original release, which means
QWERTY
ASDFGH
ZXCVBN
hotkeys get jumbled horribly depending on your build. When compared to OpenRA, it's way too behind the times. Allow players a "Legacy" and "Modern" option, to feature all buttons on the command bar and just grey out the options that are unusable. That way, no matter what build the player goes for, the hotkeys and buttons wont shift around.
I'd also like to see an option to switch between the original 360p cutscenes and the newly remastered / upscaled / framerate smoothed cutscenes by hitting space bar, same as the in-game visuals. Some of these cutscenes look really wonky and terrible whenever there's too much motion on screen or silhouettes, full detracting from the experience and immersion.
Observer mode leaves a lot to be desired. It's so limiting on what is shown to the viewer. Not to mention, where are my own replays? Why am I getting random replays from random people? Why can't I see what units / structures are being produced by what players at any given time? How many units does each player have and what type? How many harvesters exist for each player? What's the income rate for each player? This is such a HUGE oversight and will detract heavily from a caster's abilities or a viewer's understanding as to what's currently going on.
Lastly, the stutters. If you do not have an SSD in the current version of the game, as of 10:00PM ET, 6/6/2020, do not buy this game. It will stutter all to hell and be virtually unplayable. We're talking full on frame hitching, dropping down to below 10FPS for 0.25-1 seconds. This is inexcusable. Avoid at all costs until this is patched and fixed.
"Why are you being so harsh on the game?"
When there's already a better product out on the market (for free, I might add), and the only major improvement here is the visuals, audio and music, then I can't recommend buying this product in it's current state. If OpenRA didn't exist, and wasn't better in virtually every other way gameplay wise, then I'd 100% say this game was worth it. But the cutscenes are botched, the framerate is a potato (on HDD), observer mode leaves a lot to be desired, and the command bar let's down the incredible key binding options. They can do better, I've seen them do better.
#FirstImpressions #CommandandConquer #CommandandConquerRemastered
As always, thanks for watching!
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