C&C2: Tiberian Sun review
Posted by Thomas McGuire on September 13, 1999 - Page 2/3
 Originality
We’ve all seen the long list of C&C clones on the market. Westwood have now done a bit of this themselves, liberally “borrowing” from the clones on the market. Examples of this would be GDI now use Mechs, wonder where they got that from….. The same can be said of NOD’s subterranean APC, borrowed from Dark Reign. Westwood can be forgiven for this lack of
originality with units though.
The missions themselves are quite good. Some being time limited & nicely where given choices the DO actually effect what happens in another mission, e.g. in one mission you have the choice of a direct assault or destroying a dam first to temporarily knock out NOD SAM sites. The dam busting mission is very difficult, but if you win you have 15 minutes in the next mission
with no operating SAM sites.
The only truly original additions are a new type of tiberium available.
Graphically the game took a step backwards in this department by not “borrowing” say, Total Annihilation & using a polygon engine.
Bugs
I encountered only 1 bug myself, concerning a Titans ability to shoot up, through a tunnel & destroy a NOD buggy. Other than that 1 thing, this is the most stable game I’ve played in some time. Well done to Westwood for that. The game also has an auto-update feature, so simply use the auto-update button to download any
patch that does become available for the game.
 
Graphics
The graphics aren’t anything truly revolutionary by today’s standards. That said Tiberian Sun takes the “enormous” leap from the original overhead 2d graphics & jumps into 3d isometric view. Most impressive is now that a voxel engine is used for the graphics engine, this means we have excellent looking terrain &
vehicles look great too. That said a polygon engine may have been more or less useful.
Soldiers are still the plain old sprites from previous games, although looking far more detailed than the previous stick men we saw. Vehicles look excellent now, particularly the GDI mechs, & tanks rolling over the 3d terrain. Explosions seem to be translucent now too.
Smoke billows from heavily damaged units now too. Terrain is now deformable, i.e. you can blow it up. Destroying buildings will leave deep craters & in one of the later levels you can even destroy ice on a river. Bridges can be destroyed now too. Overall graphics are quite impressive. Editing the sun.ini file you can get a resolution greater than 800*600.
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