I love Command & Conquer. I’ve played a lot of awful games before. Red Alert 2 and Tiberian SunLater on, I always liked to brag that I spent more time trying to maintain a top 50 or so online ranking in Red Alert 3 than I did studying. While I have great respect for the classics, deep down I actually feel that overall, Red Alert 3 is one of the most comprehensive real-time strategy games ever made. It’s one of my favorite games of all time, and one of my favorite series ever.
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Anyway. Command & Conquer is back, baby! And a new game just came out. Command & Conquer Legion It’s out in beta now. I should be ecstatic. But instead, I feel like a piece of my soul has been ripped out of my body.
I gave Legions a chance. I want to make this clear; I gave it a fair chance. I spent hours playing this game on my phone. Honestly, if a game gave me a little bit of the essence of C&C that I could play on the toilet, I would be happy. I obviously didn’t expect Red Alert 4But this… isn’t the case, is it? This isn’t the case.
Maybe it’s just me seeing it from the perspective of someone who doesn’t play many mobile games – maybe it’s the norm. But I couldn’t believe how difficult it was to get into this game.
A tight, hand-holding tutorial guides you through the basic mechanics, attempting to blend the visuals and style of Command & Conquer with the trappings of other ubiquitous base-building and siege mobile strategy games. Its biggest sin is that it boring Start.
It mainly introduces you to what feels like a hundred different currencies and concepts. Heroic-style characters are called officers, and inventories include oil, ore, and gold, as well as buffs and bonuses. Managing bases, live chat with other users, offers, shops, limited-time events, powers, radars, a pulsating icon that won’t go away no matter what I do…it’s all here.
You log into the game and it’s an absolute mess of icons: stuff everywhere to keep you busy. The jingling of buttons gets louder and louder until my eyes glaze over and roll into the back of my head. You can tell it’s so eager to keep you engaged, and the answer is obviously to bombard you with notifications every time you log in.
Obviously, the game reveals its hand pretty quickly: you can get a few officers for free, but if you want the famous C&C commando Tanya, the quickest way is to open your wallet. There are many other famous heroes in the game, but few of them mean anything to the C&C series, which doesn’t have enough truly well-known characters to fill out a 30-man hero roster.
Still, the game has Albert Einstein jumping out of a gacha loot box, so it has that advantage. I imagine him jumping out of a loot box, looking the player straight in the eye, and uttering one of his most famous quips: “Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.” Arguably, his greatest theory is proven here, confirmed by the people who invest money in this stuff.
You deploy outposts, or whatever, and wait for a timer to count down so you can claim your rewards. You upgrade a persistent base, though initially there’s no agency in the construction of that base, as the game carefully instructs you on what to build and when. C&C’s simplicity is built on two resources – ore and electricity – compressed into an endless supply of other resources, each of which must be mined and acquired, either by waiting for a timer to run out or using boosters, for which you pay, of course.
There’s also real-time strategy combat. That’s where all the ads come from. But by the time I got to this game, the annoying experience on mobile devices had demoralized me enough that I just didn’t care about it anymore.
It’s a shame, too, because the combat looks pretty good. And the concept of a parallel Command & Conquer universe, where the Red Alert and Tiberium storylines coexist, is at least interesting. But most of all, I just can’t believe it. this is the next step for this franchise.
When EA released Command & Conquer Remastered in 2020, an EA producer publicly stated that the game “exceeded all of our expectations.” I, like many fans, thought that the next step might be to remaster more games, and maybe even explore something new. I think they did explore something new – but this new thing is a tragic, cynical thing.
Interestingly, I don’t even think Legions’ cynicism is appropriate. I think people who have fond memories of C&C are by and large older and more discerning, and even if they’ve stopped playing, they’re probably more comfortable with the hectic “numbers forever going up” game design. Meanwhile, those who Do This game is usually played – millions of people are deceived by complete nonsense, e.g. Mobile Suit Attack – probably have no idea what Command & Conquer is, let alone why they’re so excited about an alternate universe where Yuri is still alive.
I hate the kind of rhetoric I’m about to use. I’m a firm believer that, for the most part, any game series is what the developers say it is. Final Fantasy 16 may be an action game first and an RPG second, but it’s still a Final Fantasy game because the people who made Final Fantasy said it was. That being said, let me indulge in a moment of supreme hypocrisy: this piece of garbage is not a Command & Conquer game. It’s a standard mobile strategy game dressed up as one of the greatest series in PC gaming history.
This is garbage. I’m going to reinstall Red Alert 3.
