// View: Command and Destroy (NintendoDS)

The Red Alert/Command and Conquer series of strategy games, are, to this writers mind, the finest examples of the ‘old-school’ RTS. Build base, collect resource, build tanks, STOMP ENEMY. Tank rushes be damned; when it comes to strategy gaming only Advance Wars comes close to sucking up the sort of hours the C&C games occupied in my youth – so you’ll have to forgive me when I admit I was bouncing off the walls like a drug-spazzed toddler at the prospect of a DS RTS so clearly ‘inspired by’ Westwood’s legacy.

Between anticipation for this and fond memories of games gone by, I should be on a blissful high.

Needless to say, I’m in the midst of a nasty bout of cold turkey – crippled fingers, visions of blurry units fudging into one incoherent mess, and, more disturbing than any of that – horrific night terrors of a password based save system.

You heard: Command and Destroy is apparently so determined to remain true to retro sensibility it ignores ‘modern’ innovations like battery back-up and goes for an outdated password save – the kind of thing that died out with the 16-bit era. This is apparently due to C&D’s history as a GBA title, but it’s no excuse when you consider the hundreds of GBA titles saving relatively large amounts of game data to cartridge. Frankly this just the tip of developer Cypron Studios’ bone-idle iceberg: despite being billed as ‘Humans vs. Aliens’, the most alien thing about your extra-terrestrial foe is their bizarre taste in appropriate battle-gear (apparently lurid yellow uniforms are de rigueur for Future War situations). In terms of effectiveness the human (clad, more tastefully if just as nonsensically, in ‘Stereotypical Earth Blue’) and alien factions play identically, with only superficial differences in appearance to mark one army out from another. It’s an appropriate commentary on a game devoid of originality in any way. (Seriously chaps – that title. You mean to say there was nothing more original you could think of other than replacing ‘& Conquer’ with ‘& Destroy’?)

Another hangover from the games’ GBA days is the horrible, horrible control scheme. Torn between dropping their GBA scheme and taking the effort to implement bona fide touchscreen controls, Cypron have fudged them together, leaving the player to deal with the inevitable arthritic wrists at a later date. Uncomfortable, awkward and slow, trying to negotiate through menus and order units around is just too complicated for it’s own good, with too many shoulder-button clicks and touchscreen prods required to achieve simple operations. As you’d expect, in the heat of battle these unnecessary complications take things beyond inconvenience and into the realm of sheer frustration.

The worst thing about C&D, though, is the huge opportunity blown by either laziness of ineptitude. As a game on it’s own merits is barely passable, but in standing on the shoulders of giants with such brazen disregard for what actually made those titles the classics they are, well, Command & Destroy is little more than an insult.