A great expansion to a great game, and the new gameplay mode is a blast, while it doesn't live up to its full potential.
Sound: 8.5
Lasting value: 7
Gameplay: 9
Innovation: 9
Total: 8.5
The Good:
-The many new units are finely balanced and add to the gameplay
-The campaign is solid, engaging, and features plenty of impressive cutscenes
-The new Global Conquest mode is absolutely brilliant
The Bad:
-The epic units aren't as balanced as they should be
-The campaign is way too short and doesn't offer much new
-Global Conquest can't be played with others and doesn't have a story mode
The long-awaited expansion pack for Command & Conquer 3, Kane's Wrath, features plenty of new units (including some from C&C: Tiberian Sun, fans rejoice!) and 30 new skirmish maps. The new units include the 'epic' units, one for each faction, which could use some balance tuning; the MARV (a GDI supertank) is much stronger than its Nod and Scrin counterparts. For the rest, the units are reasonably balanced and add a lot of gameplay depth. Every faction has 2 subfactions, which have some different units (although the difference between the subfactions, especially the GDI ones, is sometimes barely noticeable).
Kane's Wrath features a new campaign from the Nod perspective that encompasses 20 years, from the end of the Second Tiberium War to after the Third Tiberium War. The story can be somewhat confusing when you haven't played Tiberian Sun, because the chapters don't form one story but provide background information on an existing story. The missions are still of top quality, though there's little that you haven't seen in the original game. You're definitely supposed to have played the original game before attempting Kane's Wrath's campaign, because the gameplay receives little introduction and the missions are considerably harder. The main flaw with the campaign is that it's way too short; it can be completed in no more than 8 hours. And there's no campaign from the GDI or Scrin perspective. You hardly get to battle the Scrin at all, so their new units and subfactions are completely new to you when you start playing Skirmish mode.
The Global Conquest mode is a brilliant idea and a fantastic addition to the Command and Conquer series. It plays much like Risk, but with a Command & Conquer flavour. You build strike forces and bases around the world map and must either eliminate the other factions or complete another victory condition. The factions are very well balanced, as each of their victory conditions are hard but certainly not impossible to achieve. Rather than capturing territory sectors, you send strike forces with MCVs to any area on the map and deploy them into bases to gain more 'area of influence'. This has several advantages, such as having more places to deploy new strike forces in, and earning more tiberium (money) each turn.
You can compose your strike forces with units of your choice, with more powerful units costing more money. When two strike forces clash, you can choose between 'auto-resolve' (where, like in Risk, it is calculated what the approximate outcome of the battle would be) or 'real-time', when you fight the battle like a traditional C&C skirmish.
However, it doesn't really matter how many units you have as long as you have an MCV and something to defend it with. When you deploy your MCV, you can construct buildings like in a normal battle, and you don't even have to use your original units. So you hide your original units in a corner and annihalate your enemy with new units, so that in the end, you won't have lost a single unit. This is really a pity, because it removes much of the suspension from the battles. It would have been better if MCVs were not to be used in battles, but only to deploy bases on the world map.
Bases can be upgraded to Tier 2 or Tier 3, which gives them more options and the ability to construct better units. This is a good concept, but it can be imbalanced; when you build a strike force with an epic unit like the MARV, you can easily crush any Tier 1 or 2 strike force, and not lose any units because an epic unit is a single unit and remaining units of a strike force are restored to full health after every battle.
The AI in Global Conquest can be a major annoyance, because they are often as dumb as an ... They can have bases and strike forces standing next to each other for 10 turns without doing anything. And, here comes the worst part: there is no multiplayer! It would be awesome to battle your friends online in a large turn-based game, but that's not possible. Multiplayer options are restricted to skirmish mode, which is the main flaw of this game. It would also have been great if Global Conquest featured a story mode, but there's only simple battles against the computer.
Graphically, the game hasn't improved upon Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars, and that game looked good, but not particularly impressive. The sound effects are still of the same top-notch quality, as is the acting. But the solid but short campaign and the innovative Global Conquest mode make this game worth your while. For 30 euros, it may be a bit overpriced, given that the campaign is brief and Global Conquest has no story or multiplayer mode, but when you're a Command & Conquer fan or like RTS games in general, you should certainly pick this one up.