Squandered potential. If one were to look up the definition of this phrase, then Command & Conquer 4 Tiberian Twilight's box art could be its Exhibit A. Billed as the finale to a genre-defining series, it's disappointing on almost every level and slap to the face of CnC and RTS fans everywhere.

Set a few years after the end of the expansion to Tiberium Wars in 2052, humanity is almost at death's door, with over 90% of the planet uninhabitable to humanity as the alien substance Tiberium has almost entirely overwhelmed the Earth. Kane suddenly makes an appearance before the leaders of GDI, promising them a way to win back the planet and still benefit from Tiberium if they join forces with him. With literal extinction staring them in the face, they have no choice. By 2072, the Tiberium Control Network they joined with him to build has reclaimed much of the planet for humanity and it continues to improve. Yet seething GDI angry at all the bloodshed Kane caused and extremist Nod forces who feel betrayed that Kane allied with their longtime foe are all too willing to toss this salvation of humanity aside to begin a Fourth Tiberium War.

Like all prior games, this is a real-time strategy game. You must deploy forces, capture key points, defend certain areas, and lead your forces to victory regardless of the side you ally with. They have a variant on the co-op gameplay from Red Alert 3 should you wish to play with a friend, or you can play solo in the campaign mode. The former building of base structures and bases, in general, has also been replaced by a base that is mobile and can be moved anywhere on the battlefield and deploys all units on the go.

Unfortunately, the ugly truth of this game is that it's really a mobile game in a very poor disguise. Early on, it was intended as a mobile side game for the series that the developers were forced under protest to attach a full single-player campaign to and release as a full Command & Conquer title, and it shows. The former literal armies you could deploy have been chopped down to laughably small platoon-size units due to a unit cap system (because mobile games have poor requirements for handling a lot of objects in memory), leading many missions to take place with oddly small forces skirmishing instead of actual armies doing battle like prior Tiberium games. This is married to a bizarre requirement to always be online even for single-player mode, the campaigns for both sides are very short, and the plot leaves a ton of unanswered questions from prior Tiberium games hanging.

Graphically, this game doesn't do more than the prior Tiberium Wars or its expansion did, looking about the same. Even reuses many of the same assets and set pieces, married to a scrunched-up mobile game-style user interface. The live-action cutscenes also seem to have been done on the cheap, with both the formerly distinct and well-done GDI and Nod uniforms reduced to generic digital camo for GDI and dark outfits for Nod with their logo pins on them. Most of the set designs feel pretty basic and the cutscenes are incredibly scrunched like they would be on a mobile platform, even at high resolutions. Many of the special effects also look like something done in a free GIF editor in many cutscenes as well. The actual gameplay looks okay, albeit doesn't improve on whatever they did in prior games. Some of the new units look interesting, but that's about all I can compliment.

The sounds and music honestly feel like a step down from prior titles. No Frank Klepacki music or even the decent score we got with Tiberium Wars, a lot of this feels very generic and phoned in, like off-the-shelf Unity or Unreal asset flip tier effort. Even the voice acting feels poor, with muffled voices and a terrible script. Some unit voices aren't too bad, but even Joe Kucan doing his noble best as Kane to attempt to carry this game above its terrible writing is not enough to save a weak story that leaves a ton of plot threads from across the series hanging.

This game is controlled by a mouse and keyboard. It plays a lot like a mobile title, complete with mobile game-style tutorials. If you are a total newbie to RTS games, this is practically training wheels in game format. This is unfortunate, as a lot of the complex mechanics of the prior titles were excised to make this as simple as possible.

Stability-wise, this is a mobile game that requires an always online connection, so if you have no internet or your connection dies, so does the game, and the servers tend to be floaty at best. Online mode I was unable to test, the lobby was a ghost town and frankly, I can understand why. It does run more or less fine unless you are playing on an absolute potato and runs on Windows well enough. Linux needs some tweaks to run it and it's unsupported on the Steam Deck.

Morally, this game is going to have some problems.

Violence is typically real-time strategy fare. Vehicles and units can be deployed in combat against each other to kill or blow each other up, though the gameplay sequences are generally free of gore, and remains do disappear. The live-action cutscenes can get pretty brutal, involving one or more depicted assassinations, complete with the ability to see one character up close in their death throes before expiring.

Language is moderately earthy. Expect to hear b**t**d, b***h, and a** a few times. At one point, albeit with justification, Kane is referred to as a "g**d**m murderer", though to be fair, given the series has always implied he's the Biblical Cain and he does have a huge stack of dead bodies to his name, it's literally true.

Sexuality is fairly muted. There isn't much that is inappropriate in any way in that regard. The occult and supernatural are also somewhat muted from prior entries. Kane and the Brotherhood of Nod still have their religious undertones and Kane still retains his implication of the Biblical Cain, but the plot is more focused on politics since Kane has allied with GDI for mutual gain, hence the downplaying of these elements.

Morally and ethically, both GDI and Nod look kinda bad this time around. While the player character can choose to work with GDI or Nod after the intro missions, both are presented darkly, with the Nod campaign requiring you to help Kane win (even if his goal is relatively benign and lawful despite all the crimes he has committed) and the GDI campaign essentially has you join a rogue faction of GDI that just wants to kill Kane for straight up revenge even though the plot has had him work to fix the damage done to the planet since 1995 and bring humanity from the brink of extinction. Either way, you are forced to either cover for a mass murderer or become a rogue to your own side and go terrorist for a senseless revenge mission.

Technically, it'll work (when the servers cooperate) but is crippled by glorified mobile game mechanics neutering practically all the fun of the CnC experience, always needing to be online, and doing very little to innovate on the formula. Morally, it's a story that leaves a bad taste in your mouth regardless of what side you pick. Overall, this rightfully deserves its reputation as a disgrace to its franchise, and as a CnC and RTS fan, I suffered playing this dreck, so while it ships in a bundle with many other better games, don't bother installing it to save yourself the same pain I suffered.