Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight

Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight in 2010 closed the twenty-year-old Tiberium saga that Westwood Studios had launched back in 1995. Studio EA Los Angeles prepared the final chapter of the story about Kane, GDI, and the Brotherhood of Nod for PC, in which humanity grapples with the question of how to live at all on a planet completely infested with Tiberium after deciding to transform it instead of destroying it.

Compared to previous entries in the series, this is a major overhaul of the basic rules: the player doesn't build a classic base with buildings and resource harvesting, but instead commands a single mobile crystallizer called the Crawler, which can switch on the fly between offensive, defensive, and support configurations, and around which the entire battle unfolds. Units are also not available right away but are unlocked through gradual commander leveling similar to an RPG or online shooter, which applies to both the campaign and multiplayer, where the player carries their progress forward between matches. The game also required a permanent internet connection even for singleplayer, which, together with the simplified strategic component, sparked a series of heated debates among the series' longtime fans and put a number of them off for good. The campaign offers parallel storylines for GDI and Nod that intertwine toward the end and settle the fate of Kane and the entire Tiberium conflict – GDI tries to turn Tiberium into an energy source, while Nod under Kane's command pursues its own, much darker goal. Old familiar units from the series also get their say, reworked into a new mobile form adapted to the Crawler's constant repositioning on the battlefield instead of static base defense.

Why play: Tiberian Twilight makes the most sense for fans of the series who want to see how Kane's story and the Tiberium crisis actually end, even at the cost of a fundamentally different style of play – without base-building and with unit leveling instead of resource harvesting – than what they were used to from previous entries.