One burning question is exactly how C&C: Generals looks with the new 3D engine. In a word: awesome. Westwood put a lot of care into creating extremely detailed graphics, with lots of little touches that really accentuate the overall look and feel. When a building or vehicle has taken a lot of damage, not only does it catch fire, but also suffers battle damage, turning grayer with every shot fired at it until finally collapsing. When a person is hurt, he starts limping, and if finished off in an explosion, he's tossed up into the air and lands with a few final bounces. And speaking of explosions, they are gorgeous; when a nuke goes off the screen explodes with color and a plume of flames rise in an expanding mushroom fashion with gray smoke creeping up the sides.
The textures can be a bit drab, displaying only earth tones, but it helps convey the sense of real life war as opposed to a technicolor videogame war. The unit models are functional, looking different enough to distinguish them in the middle of a battle, but not going much beyond that. This once again enhances the practicality of real-life combat vehicles, and to keep extreme stress off your system when there are thirty or so units battling. The overall graphical package comes together extremely well, but unfortunately the C&C: Generals 3D engine does come at a high price.
While the game's minimum requirements are a bit more sedate, the recommended system specs for this game are an astounding 1.8 GHz processor, 256-MB of RAM, and a GeForce3 video card. Well you can throw those out the window, as running the game on a Pentium 4-2.0 GHz, 512-MB of RAM and a GeForce3 Ti 500 resulting in slow-downs, even at 800x600 with the video details and models all set at medium. At one point, during a cinema where a train was blown up on a bridge, a scene that would normally take 15 seconds to run, turned into a slide show on this PC. Turning down the graphical details can give playable framerates, but it does make you wonder what C&C: Generals would play like on an older PC.
Real-time strategy gamers depend on lightning-quick responsiveness, and while it's understandable that the nifty 3D graphics inherently have some level of performance cost, the game can be reduced to unplayable levels as a result. The eternal struggle between graphics and playability is an important question that developers have to ask themselves during game production. It's a tough one, as high-end system owners spend a lot of bread on new, cutting-edge games, but you're also going to potentially miss out on quite a few sales from people (especially hardcore C&C fans) with lower-end systems.
The in-game music is varied in ethnicity with brooding, preparing for war style melodies, with specific themes for each faction. The GLA has a very Middle Eastern flavor to it with Sitars strumming along while a flute whistles out above it all, and the American music is bold with heavy trumpets, French horns and a strong snare drum. The sound effects are pretty standard for RTS games. Each unit has 4 to 5 confirmation sounds with pretty heavy, and sometimes poorly imitated, accents. The gunfire from tanks is full of bass and the explosions match the visual display with an equally powerful aural one.
Command and Conquer: Generals emerges as a nice combination of Westwood and Blizzard styles, with an attractive new 3D engine, and all the fun and excitement of past C&C games. There are a few problems, such as the high system requirements, but even so, gameplay is excellent, the strategic elements have been improved, and replay value has increased significantly. C&C diehards might have a hard time catching up with all the enhancements, but on the other hand, it's a great jumping-on point for Blizzard fans. C&C: Generals is a strong step forward in the series, and establishes a new benchmark for future Westwood/EA real-time strategy games.
