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Great game, but not perfect

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 5 / 6
Date: March 31, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Pros:
-Lots of variety between the 3 factions.
-Versatile units perform many different tasks.
-Different strategies are required for different situations. This is one of the few RTS games where you actually have to strategize to do well.
-Good graphics (except for the water, which is terrible)
-Units, abilities, and super weapons are tons of fun to use.

Cons:
-Requires lots of juice to run. Don't even think of buying this game unless you have at least a Pentium 4 (or equivalent processor) and at least 256 MB of RAM.
-There's no real story to the campaigns. It's certainly realistic for you to only be doing military operations but it would be nice to have more of a story.
-Computer AI is not all that intuitive or crafty.
-Map editor is clunky and harder to use than the average RTS map editor.

Thoroughly enjoyable

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 5 / 6
Date: January 05, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This game was not exactly what I was expecting, but for only $20, I was NOT disappointed. When it was released, I really thought about buying it, I'm glad I waited for the $40 - $50 price tag to come down... normally, I like to be the first one on the block to play one of the ones I have played in the past.

Generals is a variation on the original Command & Conquer series and is not another updated version with a new name and additional units and plays, for the most part, without any sort of a similar "storyline". The RTS aspect is solid, the ai is pretty good, and the player interface is adequate (but took a little getting used to) - it's available at a fair price and worth purchasing. If I had bought this game at the original price I doubt I would have had any further interest in buying any of the the future versions of C&C, but for another $20 I will probably pick up the Zero Hour expansion pack.... something that should probably have been a free update to those that paid the initial price.

The only complaint I would make is the "view" ... it's the type of view that drops to more of a "ground level" perspective like in Empire Earth or Total War:Rome rather than a true zoom/unzoom available in a Age of Empires/ Rise of Nations or even SimCity... Generals was quite enjoyable even though that feature is not my preference.

Other than that, I thought it was fun and challenging and well worth the $20 price tag.

Frustratingly bad AI, but all else is fair and good

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: April 19, 2003
Author: Amazon User

This game frustrates me. Games are not supposed to do that. I like a challenge but I have noticed that the poor intelligence of the individual units, combined with the horribly clunky interface makes for a frustratingly frantic click-fest. The units will make poor decisions on when they attack the enemy for example; you might order your fleet of tanks to move to a location, but when they get attacked, the tanks will usually ignore them and wait for you to tell them what to do. In long games with many tasks to handle at once, this gets annoying, and you will end up losing whole armies because your units wont fight back on their own, instead they sit their idle. In some cases, your supply gatherers will be under fire, but instead of retreating, they continue their routes and ultimately explode. The worst thing is that the game wont warn you when your units are attacked or taking damage, only your buildings. You only know that you are attacked when you lose a unit. By that time you are toast anyway. You have to keep an eye on an impossibly small area map that will give you one small red radar "blip" when you are attacked. If you fail to see that, you fail to come out without casualties. Giving commands to units is like pulling teeth. You cannot have units patrol an area like you can in the Starcraft or Warcraft games. You can only have units guard and area, in which case they will simply sit idle and take fire, only returning fire when the enemy is within range. This is laughable. Setting waypoints for units is also clunky.
One more thing really irritated me. My buddy had a stealth unit in my base setting demolition charges on my buildings. One by one they exploded, but I had no idea that my base was being destroyed because I was too busy micromanaging my dopey units somewhere else. I didnýt even know what was going on until I tried to select my jets, but they were not selecting. Thatýs when I looked over to the airbase to see why and realized that my base was 80% ashes and debris. There were no warnings or anything. Itýs that lack of game polish that is making me sell this game. Otherwise the graphics, sound, and overall funfactor are all good. Itýs fun to play on the LAN, but still frustrating. I know my way around this game well and still yell at the screen, telling my stupid units to move. It is this fact that takes away from the strategic element and turns this game into a finger aching click-fest. Whoever can build the most units in a given time will win, hands down. I enjoy anything from Blizzard much more. If this game simply used Blizzards RTS interface, it would really shine, but since your options are limited and so is the intelligence of your units, you are out of luck and expect to be screaming at your monitor more that once.
Three and a half stars is accurate

Good game, but severely taxes your system

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: August 12, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Right off the bat: this is a good game. Just like all C&C games before it, the core gameplay is the same, with some differences. For starters, you can now upgrade units with enhanced technology (like upgrading weapons in Warcraft). Many units have their own individual upgrades that enhance abilities as well.

There are 3 sides: China, USA, and a world Liberation Army, which are Middle Eastern terrorists. The sides in this game are far more realistic now than they have been in past C&C games, and that makes for interesting warfare during the game. Battles can span anywhere from 15 minutes to 3 hours, and they are often very fun and challenging. Each side is fundamentally different and it will take some time getting used to all sides, as well as trying to master them. Each side has its own campaign to get through with a story to go along with it. Unlike previous C&C games, there are no cinematics between missions. Everything is told to you as you play.

Despite the fact that this is a good game, there is one problem with it that just takes the quality of it down completely: the severely high requirements it has for gameplay. I am running a top of the line system, as of August 2003 barely a year old, and Generals runs so slowly you would think that its running on a 486. I don't know why the game runs so poorly, considering the high end technology I have in my computer. Having played the game on other computers I have noticed the same thing. It just demands far too much. Unfortunately sacrifices must be made, and to run the game efficiently you will have to scale the graphics down so much that they will look severely outdated, almost looking like the old C&C games from way back in the day. The fact that this game runs so slowly on a P4, 2.0 gig with 1.2 gig ram and a GeForce 5 video card is mind-boggling. This also makes for extremely slow on-line play.

Unfortunately this rather good game is marred by its tremendous system requirements. Had it not been designed ahead of its time, it would have ran more smoothly and would have been an overall better game experience. Regardless, I enjoy the game and any C&C fan will too.

Very Accessible Strategy Game

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: January 18, 2004
Author: Amazon User

This is a game that I ended up liking a lot better than I would have thought. It isn't overly difficult or complex, allowing the strategy-rookie to get into the game easily. This is the kind of game where you can play a few missions and then come back a month later and pick up where you left of, without having to re-play the tutorial.

I would have even given this game 5 stars, if it wasn't for a few details that I didn't care for too much. The interface leaves a bit to be desired. I found myself wishing for easier ways to select and group units. Sometimes, I also wished for the game to give me a bit more feedback about what's going on. For instance, when the GLA attacks my base with a SCUD-storm, why not show where it hit on the mini map? Games like Pretorians show how to do this (at least a little) better.

The other problem with this game is that it lets you get away with too much. The game doesn't force you to use advanced strategy. Often, it is enough to just build up a very large number of troups and send them into battle all at once. In those scenarios, I often wish the game would make me find out a bit more about all the great upgrades and special units that are available. Of course, this is a problem the player could solve :-)

Overall, this is a very good game. Personally, I had a lot of fun with this game. Probably even 5 stars worth. But compared to some other 5-star games, it just didn't seem fair to give this one 5 stars as well. It just isn't quite among the very best. But if you are looking for fun without twisting your brain all too much, then this one is for you...

Good graphics sound and concept but poor quality online play

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 7 / 11
Date: July 21, 2004
Author: Amazon User

I've played this game for about the past two months, and although the game itself is pretty good when it comes to its graphics, its sound, and its concept, its online play is somewhat disappointing. I'm not referring to lag, of course I'm expecting to see some of that with performances differences in the players computers.

However, there are numerous problems with gameplay, with no apparant effort whatsoever being made by EA to stem the exploiting.

Here's one popular exploit:

The "Mismatch": A player on a losing team who knows how to do this, can intentionally cause an error that causes the players to lose sync with each other, automatically halting the game and resulting in a disconnect for all players, also referred to as a mismatch.

Theres also a hyper-sensitive censor on the public rooms where games form from, which is fine and dandy when it comes to censoring damn, hell, and its other four letter and beyond family members(and other derogatory words) but also censors words like "salami" which has a very valid non-sexual meaning, but many words that have dual meanings like that are often censored as well. In addition, the censor does not apply to player names, so players will often have obscenities in their names, and the chat censor is easily defeated by putting a space between the first letter and the rest of the word(IE: D amn) It also doesn't catch too many intentional misspellings of certain cuss words.

In addition to that, in-game live play is also governed by the same hyper-sensitive censoring guidelines. However, the disconnection menu(if a player loses a stabile connection, a menu pops up and allows that player a minute for their connection to stabilize, otherwise they are automatically booted) allows players to chat with no censoring whatsoever.

Also, there is absolutely no moderation on these game rooms, so players often rampantly spam, curse, and engage in other immature behavior with noone to stop them. There's also a bot that spams the address to website that claims to have illegal hacks for many of EA's games, but a site whose masters allegedly attempt to hack YOU when you go there. And once again, no attempt by EA to stop it. You can put players on ignore, however, that player will still be there to harass any other player in the room, especially any new players.

EA has exhibited a consistent pattern over the past four years(from what I've observed) of abusing its customer base because it doesn't care, as long as it turns a profit.

Bottom line if you play online, do so at your own risk, as EA apparantly does not care what happens online.

Serious bugs

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 12
Date: March 31, 2003
Author: Amazon User

The good : Game has decent graphics, not as stunning as Age of Mythology, but in line with Warcraft III.

The bad : The game interface is still much the same as C&C's of past. Left click everthing. Right click twice to release unit/group. Very annoying.

The ugly : First installed on my "high-end" gaming machine: Win XP Pro on an Athlon XP 1800+, 512M DDR RAM, with an Asus GeForce4 TI 4200 w/ 128M. After playing through training mission and 2 missions in the first campaign, system started locking up (not just the game, it took the whole system down). Latest patch from game co and updated drivers from nVidia, still no luck. Runs then crashes. Then, uninstalled from that machine and put on my sons PC: Win XP Pro on an Athlon XP 1800+, 512M DDR RAM, with an ATI Radeon 8500 w/ 64M RAM. Game at least runs, however, the response is extremely slow, video is choppy, and the cursor is extremely erratic (does not paint well).

Conclusion : Although the game appears to be fun, there are way too many bugs and annoyances to warrant anything other than 1 star.

good, but it's not a C&C game

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: April 25, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Unlike other reviewers on this site, I didn't experience any skips or slowdowns with this game. I'm running a 1.1 athalon and a 64 meg Nvidia 256. To be fair, I also have about 512 megs of ram wich probably helped.

The game itself was.... generic. Politically, this game should make anyone with any kind of knowledge of world events sick. The plot, such as it is, so oversimplifies world events that you really almost feel guilty for playing such a narrow, closed minded, flag waving cartoon of life. If the gameplay wasn't at least halfway decent, most people wouldn't play this at all. And gameplay is where this game departs, radically from the rest of the series.

Make no mistake, this is NOT C&C as you know and love it. In fact, the first time I got a good look at the game screen I was reminded of Blizzards 'Craft series of games. The command bar is on the bottom of the screen rather than on the side and you have to make Bulldozers (peons?) to build structures. Aside from that the old staples of C&C are still there... kind of. You still have to watch your power supply and you still gather the one resource of the game automatically, more or less. The problem I have with this game is that the few small changes to the game play make the whole thing look and feel more like a modern day version of Starcraft than C&C. The result is a game that feels generic in every way. Oh yeah, and the AI is even weaker than that of RA2.

All said and done, this is a well made RTS. This is not C&C as we've known it and if you expect it to be you will be disappointed. If you're looking for a traditional RTS to fill your time, there are cheaper games out there that do the exact same thing. What this game gets in graphical power, it loses in overall design. Buy Age of Mythology or Warcraft 3 if this is your thing. If however, you're a die hard C&C fan, you should just keep playing Red Alert 2 and wait patiently for the next part of the series to come out.

A Loyal Customer and Avid Fan of the C&C Series

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: March 31, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I have waited for this game for months and when it finally arrived it was in my PC not three days after being released. Besides to number of items you must have to make the game run smoothly like the correct chipset, the game locks up my PC every time I play it. I have followed the instructions, made sure I have the correct software and hardware but nothing makes it stop locking up. I have a brand new 200 machine, 7500 video card and sound care well past the minimum requirements. The game is very enjoyable but HIGHLY unstable. Be ready for a few hours of aggrevation.

Mininum requirements are high.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: June 07, 2003
Author: Amazon User

I have a Pentium III 1 Ghz with 512MB of RAM and an average ATI video card. GENERALS crashes regardless what I try to do - even on the lowest settings. I am NOT faulting EA Games - they obviously made a cutting edge game. This review should simply serve as a warning to those of you out there that are hard headed (like me) - that read the minimum requirements and think that a little more memory will make-up for an average video card. This is one of those games where size does matter. I am just trying to save some people the frustration of NOT being able to play this game.

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