E3 2013 Preview: Command & Conquer plays far better than a decade reboot of Generals

When even I even begin to think of Command & Conquer I can’t help to think all of the hours I spent LANing that game in all-nighter style death matches. An even better memory is when Zero Hour came out and we could customize our gameplay style. I’ll be forward and don’t judge me, I was a GLA player then and I’ll always be a GLA player.  Playing as the NOD taught me how to be fast and quick with inferior troops and still come on top. It’s all about the micro when it comes down to formidable opponents and technology.

So as a Toxic GLA player, you can imagine my excitement when one of the generals in the new Command & Conquer is a GLA general named ‘Dr. Thrax' – I needed to look no further. While the game felt very new both graphically and in gameplay, so much of that nostalgia and muscle memory started to return to me. Sure I made some bone head mistakes, but that will happen when you jump into a match without playing Generals in probably six years. Like riding a bike though, it felt right.

The Frostbite engine is doing the game wonders. It looks good and runs smooth as ever. Similar to Zero Hour, there are a bunch of generals that fall under one of the three factions:  European Union, the militant Global Liberation Army (GLA), and the Asian-Pacific Alliance (APA). While there were only six playable generals in the build I played on, there were 15 total in the pictures. Already this is two more per faction than Zero Hour. The developers were even highly concerned about getting those GLA workers those shoes they’ve been asking for so long now, “Thank you for the new shoes.”

I even got the opportunity to participate in itheir “Iron General” challenge. Much like Iron Chef, I was presented three EA employees to pick from to take on in a 1v1 challenge. It’s good to know after six years of not playing the game I still retained enough skill to beat their PR guy in a match due to time restraints. It was far closer than I’d like to admit. We took video of the whole thing and I can’t help but feel like that will make it up on GameZone soon enough. The moral of this story is that I’m installing Generals on my home PC once back home so I’ll be more than ready in case another Iron General throwdown occurs.   

"It was just one flame tank…"