Be Excellent To Each Other

This is great. I wasn't even aware it existed until I read a review of it in Custom PC this month. The review was extremely positive so I decided to give it a whirl, it's only £17.99 on Origin.

The game is a 'remaster' in the true sense of the word, it's not an FF7 style 'remake'.

As such it's basically the game as you remember it, but with a (thoroughly excellent) redraw and resolution bump, remastered audio and music (the remastered music is frigging fantastic), and a couple of very small changes to gameplay. For example they've added in build queues (I'd forgotten they weren't actually a thing in the original C&C), and you can select the right mouse button for action/move/attack instead of the left - but other than that it's 1995 era C&C, with all its quirks and limitations by modern standards.

This means the AI is pretty dumb, your own units aren't going to be winning any IQ awards, but fortunately neither are the baddies. Also, 'attack move' was not a thing in C&C and they've made a conscious decision not to add it in, as it upset the balance of the game. This means you will have to babysit your forces somewhat as otherwise they will cheerfully blunder through anything that's killing the fuck out of them because they value movement over survival.

Oh yes and you can still confuse the enemy AI by building a massive sandbag wall all around your base, outside the range of any of their ranged attackers, at which point an entire enemy army will politely sit outside your base and wait whilst you amass a gigantic enemy force that they clearly feel in no way threatened by whatsoever.

The one thing they haven't been able to remaster properly is the FMV, as the original high-quality Betacam SP tapes have been lost to the sands of time, as such they've had to rework the lo-res footage from the game itself using AI shit and stuff, but it's still a substantial improvement on the quality of the original.

Oh yes and a lot of the work was done by Petroglyph, the studio that was formed by a number of ex-Westwood folks back in the day, including those who worked on the original C&C - so this is a genuine labour of love.

I've found the game very moreish, and on several occasions have thought, 'Ooohhh I'll just take a quick look at the next level' and then two or three hours later I'm still playing it.

Obviously it all runs perfectly on modern operating systems, the multiplayer side has all been reworked (if that's your bag), they've put in a jukebox for the music, added a load of configuration options and so on - all nice modern quality of life style stuff.

Highly recommended.