Tiberium. A valuable resource that gamers have been collecting since 1995, it is a name that almost anyone can immediately associate with formally Westwood Studios, currently EALA's, Command & Conquer series... or the latest Lady Gaga music video.

The RTS genre gained popularity with Westwood Studios developing Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty, it was literally the Wolfenstein of RTS games, giving rise to WarCraft, Age of Empires, Dawn of War and Company of Heroes, not to mention the Command & Conquer franchise that followed Dune II.

The first Command & Conquer game helped develop the idea of competitive multiplayer in the genre, dialing up a friend's computer through TCP/IP and duking it out, collecting Tiberium, building tanks, creating diversions and assaulting the enemy's base, it gave popularity of the genre and thrust it into the mainstream mindset of PC Gaming.

Westwood Studios created two spin-off games upon the C&C franchise, Red Alert and Generals and while Generals appears to have been left by the roadside, Red Alert 3 was released in 2008 featuring the mainstays of the RTS genre, base-building, resource gathering and a massive sum of units on the screen at one time. It was fast paced and hectic, similar to the Turbo-named Street Fighter releases.

Many had considered Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars to be a return to form after the often criticized Tiberium Sun release, and the FPS-focused C&C: Renegade release, it featured everything from the original title, a strong continuation of the story, and those massive sum of units on the screen we so enjoyed from the first game. It is strange then that EALA decided to remove this entirely in their latest C&C title, Command & Conquer 4: Tiberium Twilight, supposedly the last in the Tiberium storyline and instead replace it with an ad-hoc Company of Heroes unit cap, limited base building, and virtually zero resource gathering, instead it feels more akin to Team Fortress 2, taking over command points, deploying a mobile base, and attempting to find the right mix of a handful of units due to the extreme level cap imposed upon the player.

For the final episode of the Tiberium universe it comes as a massive disappointment, after C&C 3 had FMV Mission Briefings involving Lost's Josh Holloway, Battlestar Galactica's Tricia Helfer and Grace Park, Michael Ironside, Billy Dee Williams to have C&C 4 contain virtually zero named actors was a disappointment, especially since many consider the FMV sequences to be as important, if not more important than the overall single-player campaign maps. The story is contrived, over-the-top, almost campy in a way similar to the Red Alert franchise than the Tiberium franchise of Command & Conquer games.

The gameplay itself is totally different to C&C 3, and it feels disappointing that one can not amass a huge army to annihilate the enemy in these missions, especially since the imbalances of previous C&C titles seems to appear here as well, only this time you can't hasten a victory with a horde of Scorpion Tanks since you can only built 6 or 7 under the unit count restrictions.

On one hand, I am pleased that this is the last Tiberium/Kane related C&C title, with the amount of changes the developers did it is good to let the series end now and on the other hand I am extremely disappointed in the way the finale of an awesome, genre-creating franchise was developed and handled, across all boards; Multiplayer, Singleplayer, FMV, DRM, Skirmish... it was a truly disappointing swan song for an otherwise amazing game franchise.