The best we can hope for now is that enough people play it to remind EA that there’s still a group of people out there who are desperate for a real, non- Starcraft RTS. It’s possible that Rivals will be fun, and it’s possible that lots of people will download and play it, but they’ll be playing something that isn’t CNC and isn’t an RTS.

Millions of people play and enjoy them, which is why EA is making Command and Conquer: Rivals. There's nothing inherently wrong with this kind of free-to-play mobile strategy game. On YouTube, EA’s official announcement video has 12,000 thumbs down and 359 thumbs up on the old Zero Hour forums, people have come out of a decade-long hibernation to shit on the announcement. In the E3 demo, a game that had just seemed to be getting interesting-the GDI player had just gotten a Mammoth Tank on the map while the Nod player had some sort of helicopter that the GDI player had no counter for-ended because of the game’s time limit.īecause it’s free-to-play, it will probably require an intense amount of grinding or deep pockets to unlock better units, rather than the standard and time-tested tech trees present in most RTSes. Games seem like they will last, at most, five minutes. Gone (or seriously dumbed down) is rushing, turtling, unit amassing, flank attacks, map exploring, and tech tree development. In Rivals, two players compete to control grids on a tiny map, and whoever happens to be standing on them when a nuclear missile countdown clock finishes gets to launch it.

Download free command & conquer rivals