Hands on with Command & Conquer 4 for mobile

For a genre that shouldn’t, in all honesty, work on mobile keypads, they aren’t half a lot of real-time strategy games available for the platform.

Each attempts its own way to get around the lack of a mouse to varying degrees of success. EA Mobile is hoping that this latest (and last) entry into the Tiberian strand of the Command & Conquer universe is the one that nails the balance between controls and retaining the same level of depth as its PC cousin.

In fact, EA would prefer to call the game a ‘Tactical RTS’ rather than just your plain old vanilla RTS, if anything because of the new ‘commandment’ mode introduced with this latest edition.

Effectively it’s a 'pause' button that also allows for commands to be given to units – very similar to that seen in the excellent Age of Empires III: Asian Dynasties, only with many more tactical opportunities for each individual unit.

Every unit in the game, from the weak-but-quick GDI Strikers to NOD Scorpion Tanks, has its own separate tech tree, allowing for both manually activated powers like ‘Repair’, to passive abilities like the Stealth Tank's ‘Surprise Attack’.

The team at EA is looking to keep a lot of what made the PC version unique intact in this mobile iteration, so that means a move away from standard base-building.

Instead, your ‘base’ as it were takes the form of a Crawler, a large, moveable machine that comes in two flavours – offensive and defensive.

Each mode has its own selection of special attacks, like Orca Strikes or the Mark of Kane, which can help change the battle in your favour, and can also be used as an extra unit on the field should you be willing to risk losing it to a stray rocket.

Command & Conquer 4 will be released on mobile networks from late August.