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It is the year 2047, when Tiberium ravaged Earth. The Brotherhood of Nod, lead by the infamous Kane is back with a vengeance to conquer the last remaining bastions of civilization left on the planet. It is up to you and the Global Defense Initiative to stop Nod and restore order.

Command and Conquer 3 is a fast-paced, high-tech futuristic real-time strategy game with a powerfully compelling story line that will drive you from mission to mission in the single-player campaign. The underlying story for C&C3 is the salvation of the world government on a war-torn planet as you fight to defend it from a megalomaniac bent on dominating the last refuges of society.

As an RTS, C&C3 relies on acquiring resources and using those resources to produce structures and units. The structures range from headquarters to processing plants and barracks to weapons plants. The structures are then used to produce your actual units; infantry, tanks, harvesters, aircraft and the like as your technology advances and opens new options. The key to the production is an alien crystalline mineral known as Tiberium, which is toxic and deadly to life on Earth. So, you will find that control of the Tiberium fields will become a deciding factor in the success of your missions.

The first few missions you will play involve training on the use of the Xbox 360 controls and will lead you through the steps necessary to play the game. Once you have "mastered" the basics, the missions will become more involved and will start to make available more sophisticated units for your use. There is a mission tree which will become evident once you are past training that will allow you to choose a direction in the war against the Nod. As you make these choices and successfully complete the missions, new options open up for you.

Between missions, and especially at the beginning of the campaign, the game plays vignettes that make the game seem more like an interactive war film. The commander of the GDI is played by Michael Ironside, who starred in numerous science-fiction works, including "Starship Troopers" and "SeaQuest DSV." Just seeing his grimacing face in the game was enough to make me sit up and take notice. The vignettes also function as your mission briefings for the game, entertaining though they may be, you need to make sure you're paying attention so you know your objectives in the upcoming mission.

The game is completely immersive through the use of the video clips that speak directly to you to your being put in command of the GDI forces facing off against Nod. The game does a great job of making the battles personal and of putting you in the middle of it. Failure is NOT an option.

Since I have not played any of the previous C&C games, I can't really speak to any sort of comparison of C&C3 to its predecessors. As far as my experience with C&C3 goes, I have to say that EA has done a bang up job of creating a remarkable futuristic RTS game for the Xbox 360. The game shows an exceptional amount of creativity, both in the extensive and colorful history for the games universe and in the implementation of that story in the gaming environment.

For me, the game is a bit difficult to play. This is my first experience with an RTS-style game on a console system. And I had some issues with the control of the units using a game pad. I'm much more used to the use of a mouse and keyboard when playing RTS games. Though I can see where making games of this type - especially one like C&C3 - available for the console players is quite a breakthrough and makes the game more available to those gamers who may not have a computer powerful enough to handle the system requirements and yet still links them into the global C&C community. In terms of actual gameplay, the game has numerous options and controls, and I did get confused on a couple of occasions in trying to get something accomplished.

The user interface helped quite a bit in keeping the information and controls on screen and organized. And once I became more adept at the button combinations, I was able to move through the option trees more swiftly and not get my butt kicked by the system quite as readily.

The gameplay was smooth, and the graphics flowed well. I had no lag issues while playing the game, even with numerous units on screen and bombs and missiles flying every which way.

C&C3 has been great fun to play, though a little frustrating at the same time. I'm amazed at the volume of history associated with the game going back to its origins in 1995 with the original Command and Conquer. I may have to see if I can find copies of them. During my research, I did find that there are copious amounts of information written by fans on Wikipedia, including not only the series of games, but also information on the various factions in the game. I found it extremely enlightening.

Overall, I'd have to say that playing C&C3 on the Xbox360 was great fun and a good learning experience for me. I think, in the future, I'll stick to RTSs on the computer. This is not to say that you shouldn't give the game a shot on Xbox, but if you don't have a computer and still want to get into the Command and Conquer universe, this is your best bet, and I'd highly recommend it.