Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun

As someone not particularly well-versed in the Command & Conquer series, Tiberian Sun doesn’t strike me as functionally very different from the first game at all. You do the same things through the same interface, resource management and war fought with a handful of drags and clicks. There are some clever new units eventually, but they’re window dressing; it’s a limited evolution at most. And yet, Tiberian Sun also a lesson in how much of a transformation in feeling a few aesthetic tweaks can achieve.

Like Command & Conquer, it’s still based on a global alliance against a terrorist group based in our world. It doesn’t present real places quite as prominently for the most part, although it’s still pretty obvious where you’re meant to be from looking at the shape of countries on maps. An early mission being set in Benghazi took me out for a second. Its cutscenes are more professionally acted than Command & Conquer’s and aren’t yet quite ”SPACE!”-level over-the-top, but are nonetheless decidedly in the camp of camp. And every action you take is, like in Command & Conquer, guided by a calm voice, female if you are on the Global Defence Initiative Side, your smart speaker digital assistant a couple of decades early (well, it is set in 2034).

In all of that it’s the same slick, distanced approach that kept Command & Conquer away from the brash grossness of Desert Strike but also left it feeling uncomfortably inhuman. Tiberian Sun, though, suggests a lot more awareness of what it is doing. It looks different, with one of the bigger changes being the lighting, with bases sending out searchlights and bits of the screen bathed in colour. Tiberium, the fuel that powers everything you do, that requires you to send out harvesters and protect them from attack, casts a sickly green glow around it. The spaces you fight in look more barren and alien, even as there is more evidence of civilization present. There are collections of civilian buildings standing tall, some given the names of people and businesses, but they look completely washed out and lifeless. It made me think of Nier: Automata and its collection of robots and androids fighting amongst the wreckage of absent humanity.

Also extremely effective for the changed mood is the soundtrack. Series mainstay composer Frank Klepacki was joined by Jarrid Mendelson and together they made something quite different. The busy industrial pop of Command & Conquer set adrenaline pumping. For Tiberian Sun, any adrenaline is via fear. The same beats pound, but everything else is hollowed out, leaving them to boom emptily, melodies hesitantly creeping into a space as barren and ominous as the landscape. Even before you get onto the game’s story about the destruction that war and tiberium are doing, many elements scream at you that there is something wrong, whoever and however you are playing. And those changes make everything else in the game feel different, even when you’re doing the same things. I still didn’t love the experience, but the time I spent tracking down the last units on maps felt a lot less boring and empty than in Command & Conquer.