I have been a fan of the CnC series for a long time. I would have to agree that Generals is possibly the best CnC game so far. Generals takes quite a different approach compare to the previous CnC games. The previous games had video cut scenes with real actors and had a story driven singleplayer campaign. But in Generals, cut scenes are done by the game engine which IMO looks pretty good, and there isnt much story telling. I cant say that it is bad, because it isnt. It may sound bad for an CnC game, but in the process of playing the game I found out that the singleplayer campaign is actually pretty addictive. IMO it's mainly due to the extremely well done gameplay and the balance of the three sides. You never get the feeling that one side is too strong or too weak. The missions arent too hard at normal level. Some levels are pretty challenging but never impossible. It gets quite intense at times especially when the enemy has a scud launcher and the timer is ticking, but in the end good strategy pays off. You will have situations like in the movie "Black Hawk down", when you send a couple of your attack choppers to an urban area to clear it out, and suddenly missiles come out of nowhere and one of your choppers is down and you have to rescue the pilot. One of the other feature I really like is the ranking feature for individual units. It means that when an unit kills a certain amount of enemies, this unit will then gain a higher rank which will make the unit more effective, so when a veteran pilot gets shot down, it's actually very rewarding for you to try to rescue him. There is also a feature for the player to gain special units or extra services from somewhere off-map when the player achieves a higher rank as the commander of his force. You gain experience points by destroying enemy units and buildings, when the experience point bar is full then you've gained a higher rank as a commander. This feature is quite rewarding and it encourages you to go out and attack your enemies. Some of the special service is pretty cool, such as the US EMP bomb which is dropped by a b-52 bomber from somewhere off-map. It powers down all buildings in a radius making it a really good weapon for disabling your enemy's defence before your attack. There are so many other good gameplay features in Generals which I wont mention here. Talk about graphics in Generals. It really blew me away. I can hardly describe it by words, you will just have to see it to believe it. I especially like the animations of the units and the special effects like the explosion. Sound of the game. Again it's almost perfect. I have a pretty good speaker system. At the end of the GLA campaign, I could feel my whole table shaking when watching the cut scene for launching of the nuclear missile, it's really an amazing experience. The value of the game is excellent. There is skirmish mode and multiplayer mode with fair amount of maps. Overall I really like this game and would recommend it to any RTS fans or CnC fans.
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