Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight

When faced with the round peg that is the RTS genre and the square hole that is the mobile/keypad controls, most developers tend to develop a game that shaves down the established genre conventions like base-building and rushing until it just about fits inside.

Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight takes a different approach – it changes the peg

What this means is that, like its PC cousin, the emphasis is no longer on building a base, sucking up attacks, and then unleashing hell upon your foes, but rather a more organic pushing forward of a few units.

Helping mould this way of thinking is the new Crawler unit, which acts as both your ‘base’ and your strongest unit in battle.

It comes in two forms, picked before the start of each of the campaign’s 12 missions – offensive and defensive – with each bestowing its own set of advantages and disadvantages.

With the offensive Crawler, more units become available and the special attacks are more destructive, while the defensive model allows turrets for protecting nodes away from the frontline troops.

The controls are streamlined to give the player control over all aspects of the game’s tech tree and squad management no matter where he is on the (admittedly small) map.

With hot-keys assigned to the diagonals on the keypad, it’s very easy to start assigning new units to a squad and choose the next research target, while simultaneously sending another to attack an enemy node.

Along with the excellent controls, the graphics are some of the best I’ve seen in a mobile game, with larger robots like the Mastadons looking and sounding like suitably frightening killing machines.

There’s not going to be many of them on screen at once though - not because of the expense (although they are quite expensive), but because of the stingy unit limit imposed on the game.

With just nine units (plus the crawler) maximum on a level, those hoping for the large scale conflicts of Age of Empires or Art of War will find C&C4’s battles a little sparse.

This lack of troops is slightly easier to take given the game’s emphasis on using the 'pause' button to activate individual units’ special abilities, but the lack of a Skirmish mode is a more serious issue, especially given the relatively short nature of the Campaign.

But, while it may be shorter and smaller than its peers, Command & Conquer 4’s interesting controls, excellent graphics, and unusual direction secures it a tactically advantageous position on the mobile battlefield.