There’s something in the soul of Command and Conquer: Generals modders that draws them to two patently absurd ideas: that Europe will ever have a unified military and that Russia will become a globally relevant military power again. Global Conflagration demo commits to the first one and goes cheeky with the second. Also, GLA is replaced by… Carpathia?
The Global Conflagration demo actually gave an introduction into its world. NATO dissolved in 2011 which lead the Russian Federation to transform itself into a leading European power. This scared the EU enough that they started forming their own military. The tutorial mission brings these fresh forces to the… Lithuanian border? Awriiiight, two for two on demos unexpectedly featuring my country. Have you played Command and Conquer: Generals before? Then you know what this game is. But the devs have noticed that better things are possible, so they have revamped resource gathering. Instead of resource piles harvested by gatherers that dump their load at the depot two meters away, you now capture and secure nodes. Yes, this is a blatant Dawn of War-ism, and I’m all for it. Naturally, different factions garrison the nodes different ways.Not much has changed for base-building, however. You start with the HQ, build a power plant, build barracks, and so on. New buildings and research give access to new stuff. Carpathians seem to be the only ones with an interesting choice there: at least two unit production buildings allow you to sacrifice access to more advanced units in favor of cranking out more of the basic ones. Though from my experience playing against the AI, it was already pretty good at just spamming basic infantry to wipe you off the map before the game really begins. The faction roster suggests that this Global Conflagration is very local. The first faction is the Europeans, featuring the most survivable stuff and the most recognizable modern military projects. Wagner Vanguard PMC are the Russian proxies – you can even build Spetsnaz teams sent to babysit them. Carpathians are your mass garbage army. While all basic infantry can now gain some durability by digging in, their’s are the only ones that don’t get a special weapon once deployed. And yes, this is basically a resurrection of the GI concept from Red Alert 2 but applied much more widely. Of course, since the game is built on Command and Conquer, it plays the same way as well. Time to kill is fairly short, morale and cover don’t exist, so battles devolve to just a huge murder moshpit. I’m sure there are folks with overclocked nervous systems that can micro units to always attack the most desirable target, but that could never be me. In any case, quantity has a quality of its own, and that’s before you call in some “general power” to smack the enemy with a cruise missile. On the technical side of things, Global Conflagration demo looks great. The Euros are all shiny and clean as a future force should be, Vanguard structures are very militaristic, and Carpathians are shabby and depressing. The units are fairly detailed as you can see in the close-up above (I also enjoy Vanguard’s “I can’t believe it’s not BTR-152” BPM-97). Players will also be able to create custom camouflage schemes for their forces, which will surely result in some horrid neon garbage. More importantly, the devs haven’t skimped out on the audio budget and the unit barks are solid. Seriously, if you need to chose whether to save on visuals or audio, save on visuals. Global Conflagration is setting out to be a inheritor of Generals‘ mantle. And that’s great as many new games bafflingly try to recreate StarCraft II instead, failing on all counts. Now, if only someone made a better Dawn of War…
