GAME REVIEW: Command and Conquer Remastered Edition - Remaster Done right, But please give MacOS Native Support for this game!!!

This comes as a 25-year Silver Jubilee anniversary for the Command and Conquer series. And it is a remaster rather than a remake of the first two games in the series, Tiberium Dawn and Red Alert 1 including all of their expansions. It's released on STEAM and EA Origins on 6th June 2020. It was developed by former employees of the original Westwood Studios who now formed Petroglyph Games, the same developer company that made Forged Battalions, another RTS Game that was decent.

Tiberium Dawn: New construction options: Global Defense Initiative. I keep forgetting the
Conyard looks so tiny compared to the refinery in TD!

Now I've started first with Red Alert then the expansions of Counterstrike and Aftermath. Later on, I only played the Sega Saturn version of Tiberium Dawn on one of my cousin's interface then later Red Alert Retaliation which is a PS1 port of the Counterstrike expansion. Both similar interfaces. But PC versions are the way to go here.

OVERVIEW OF CHANGES

With that said the remaster does bring about a massive update / overhaul to the game's interface, graphics and music with the aim of keeping the gameplay of the game the same as the original as much as possible. 

Red Alert 1: Defending mountain passes with the Allies! My favorite faction. This was the mission
that appeared on the CD Manual of the original Red Alert. This is from the Chuwi Minibook m3-8100Y.
This will be taken over by the Chuwi UBook Pro with the same specs.

Massive details like guns, turrets, and other stuff in each unit has been tweaked. For a full comparison, I've linked a video by Starfals comparing old vs the new units of Red Alert 1. He's doing all the comparisons at this moment. Alot of the graphical detail that was missed in the original was enhanced, like adding machine gun cupola on the APC, guy at the back with the machine gun on the ranger jeep. The works.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHUtYgJqaFE

The other noticeable changes brought to the game was the sidebar. Featuring the Red Alert 2 and C&C3 Tiberium Wars style build tab, separated to buildings, infantry, vehicles (which includes aircraft and naval vessels), as well as super-weapons / powerups. As well as the power meter. It also shares the 3 column icons instead of 2, from C&C3 and OpenRA.

But what they could have done is when a Power Plant or Construction yard is selected the power consumption is displayed, like it did in Tiberium Sun and Red Alert 2. Also the game is designed to run now at 60 fps no matter on the game speed, which makes it way more fluid and smooth and less stiff.

Also what is brought in is build queues. And you can have up to 99 same/different units in the queue at a time. Harvesters and Ore Trucks will automatically harvest ore the moment it comes out of their war / weapons factory provided you have a refinery.

A huge welcome addition that was not in the original is the ability to completely rebind your keys from the keyboard settings of the main menu. You don't need to use the defaulted hot keys preset from the game. You can tweak it to any key you like for faster commands. There's an extensive guide from Bryan Vahey as to get your key bindings going, as well as some basics to help you get used to hotkeys. If you're someone who likes messing with hotkeys, this is the best guide to use.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sLB-Hf8Oe4

The Ability to completely rebind your keys is huge.
Credits: Bryan Vahey's C&C Remaster Basic Tips

SOUND FX AND MUSIC:

Sound effects have also been updated to use a newer engine thanks to the advantage of Hi-Definition audio. They sound decent, but not too great. However, there is a little tweak that you can do if you want the nostalgia factor. Head to the settings and turn the old sounds of the classic game back on. That's usually what I would prefer to play along with the High Def Graphics enabled.

The music is remastered and rearranged by the original composer, the legendary Frank Klepecki who did the original soundtracks for both Red Alert and Tiberium Dawn. What I'll say is simply turn up your subs and enjoy it. And if you'd like to relive nostalgia, again from the settings, you can play the old music.

PERFORMANCE:

Comments based on the game are pretty mixed by most people. But I didn't seem to come across much performance issues on mine. Only thing I have at times is sometimes a noticeable drop in frame rates when there are too many health bars on screen, especially when the setting of health bars always on is selected.

But other than that it is a very light title to run. Here's my test device:

Core m3-8100Y
16GB DDR3L RAM
Intel UHD 615 Graphics

And now the requirements below.

Light requirements in 2020, I mean REALLY light. Which makes the game easy to run on most PCs.

With requirements like a Core 2 Duo, pretty much any potato or office Basic PC can run this game. Heck, I have no problems running it with a Core m3-8100Y from a Chuwi MiniBook with an Intel UHD graphics 615. It's worse than iGPUs that have Intel HD 520, 620, and Iris 5100. So if my little minibook can run this game just fine, and at 1920 x 1200 (Although borders limit playable to 1920 x 1080p), don't worry about your old PC if you'd want to run this game. You need about 32 Gigs of storage space which may sound a lot for a light title, but at least it's a far cry from like 120GB games that really irk me off. I strongly believe games should never exceed 75GB in space and really expect all developers to stick to it.

I'd say a GTX 750Ti even for an old budget GPU, is considered overkill. Like real overkill when I tried it on my GTX 860M Laptop based on this GPU, 100+ or more FPS is no problem with that. Kinda says alot of the lightness of the game.

BONUSES: Galleries

As you continue to play the game, you'll unlock some more hidden treasures and behind the scenes picture galleries, what goes on during development. I think it's a nice touch for a way to showcase the rich history of Command and Conquer and how it really became a catalyst of then an all new genre of Computer games, Real Time Strategy. It's worth taking a look as a bit of a breather in between missions and game time. 

THE GOOD: Almost everything, even touchscreen support for small micro missions is nice.

So far I've been playing this on my Chuwi Minibook with a core m3-8100Y and what it brought to the table was touchscreen support. Although you can simply use the mouse and keyboard method as it was in the classic, this was how close I can achieve a mobile experience on the game. Loved the interface, the music and how light the requirements are.

Here's an example of me playing on touchscreen, the first mission of Tiberium Dawn.

Some people do report Sidebar graphical issues which I've seen on STEAM forums but so far on my minibook, no problems. That said it's one problem that needs addressing.

THE BAD: Mainly OS Support, abit crash heavy on Multiplayer

Out of the box, some improvements are definitely needed out of the box in terms of Quality of Life improvements and game balancing. Some people complain of the very slow growth rate of tiberium and ore. I know I can easily address this with the Rules INI file, which is always something I like to mess with, but it should be adjustable in game especially for multiplayer where the universal values isn't exactly the best. Hard difficulty is reported to be REAL hard that it's broken. But usually I go to the max of Medium.

No MacOS Support which is FUCKING BULLSHIT!!!

Multiplayer is a bit flaky as well. With me and my friend RocketAbyss facing constant crashes till we quickly join launch games before it has the chance to crash out. Not perfect but fixable.

The biggest deal breaker for me is the lack of MacOS and Linux native support. Because despite the amount of computers I have, my daily driver is STILL my 2014 13.3" MacBook Pro running on High Sierra. And I've quite a lot of friends from school who still use MacOS that want to play this game without going the route of a Virtual Machine and Boot Camp JUST for this one game. That's a reason why I gave the STEAM review a thumbs down.



And I also don't see why Windows 7 is also supported. Some people who run Windows 7 on it reported it runs fine however. And believe me, Windows 7 is still my favorite windows based OS even though I largely have switched to Windows 10 on most of my platforms.


BOTTOMLINE: Still have tweaks to iron out. But at least it's a remaster done right.

There's still some issues to sort out since the release of the game, like stuttering issues, some UI issues, and complaints over AI pathfinding and slow growth of ore / tiberium. These are the little issues that we've come to expect over launch day and pre-patch. But still the biggest factor is lack of OS support.

However with all that brought to the table for a decent 20 USD, which is fair considering you have 2 games with you, at least it's a remaster, mostly done right. Great graphics, decent sounds and awesome music with the option of using legacy ones along with light requirements, make it a good game to install on office notebooks or Windows Tablets and just play abit on the move.

But Please, for God's sake get MacOS / Linux Support on this damn thing!!!!