From Aaron Stanton,
Your Guide to Nintendo Games.
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The touchscreen of the Nintendo DS has always made it a console that could do what others could not, at least in some genres. Real Time Strategy is one of those genres that is simply hard to pull off without a mouse, or at least some equivalent. As a consequence, even the home consoles like the Xbox 360 - with lots of power to work with - have struggled to produce a really good RTS title comparable to what you can find on the PC. Control has always been an issue.

Luckily, having the right controls is not an issue for the Nintendo DS. The DS's touchscreen and stylus serve almost as effectively as a mouse, missing only a few hotkeys to make it an ideal RTS environment. Command and Destroy attempts to take advantage of this trait, and claims to be the first full-featured RTS to appear on Nintendo's handheld.

For the most part, Command and Destroy delivers on this claim, offering plenty of units, resource mining, and all the trappings of the RTS genre. What it doesn't do is offer a gaming experience that manages to present anything new. It's as if the developers took a game straight from the early days of the RTS genre, and put it on a handheld. The upside of that is that you get a faithful execution of the basics of any real time strategy game. The downside is that, aside from the fact that you can carry it around with you, it's exactly what you've seen in every RTS game ever made.

Controls:

The controls in Command and Destroy are competent, but not perfect. You use the stylus as you would a mouse, tapping units to select them, or dragging boxes to select multiple units. Double tapping a unit selects all similar units within the same screen. Once a unit is selected, you can double tap on a spot to move the unit there, or on an enemy to order an attack. To select a different unit, you simply press the B button and move on. Hitting the shoulder buttons allows you to bring up the build menu, which allows you to build units and additional buildings.

For the most part, this setup works fairly well, though it takes a few missions before you really start getting into the groove of things. By the time the difficulty and complexity of C&D ramp up, you'll find yourself easily in control of your army.

Units and Gameplay:

If you've ever played the original Command & Conquer series, you'll know what to expect in Command & Destroy. The early missions give you only basic units such as scouts and infantry. Later missions allow you to mine resources, build tanks and refineries, and train engineers and saboteurs. The game does a decent job of making the units on the two opposing sides (aliens and humans) behave differently, and you can play as either side.

It does a terrible job, though, of telling a story. Short of very brief one or two sentence descriptions at the start of each mission, there's never an explanation of why humans are fighting aliens. Not really. Generally, you have to settle with the idea that aliens are aliens and humans are humans, and fight they will. The game won't provide any more details. That aside, the only issue I have with the gameplay - besides that it's the same gameplay we had 10 years ago - is that your nearby units are damaged when a building explodes. It's almost impossible to destroy a building without the attacking unit taking some damage when the building finally goes poof. All in all, that's a pretty mild complaint.

You Can't Save Your Game:

One of the most perplexing things about Command & Destroy is its lack of a save feature. Instead, C&D has a code system reminiscent of the old NES days, when saving your data took hardware in the cartridge that wasn't readily available. Instead of saving your game, each mission has a code. In order to return to a specific point in the campaign, you have to write down and re-enter that code each time you turn on the Nintendo DS. You can't save the game in the middle of a level, and if you lose your codes you're out of luck. Quite frankly, the ability to save the game is so common place now that its lack in C&D is more perplexing than anything else. Especially with a portable unit, I hate having to pack around a code book just because I might decide to continue my battles on the go.

Conclusion:

Found at a bargain price, Command & Destroy is actually a fairly good game. Fans of the RTS genre will find all the basic trappings of the PC counterparts, but in a portable form. C&D avoids the pitfall of trying to simplify the RTS experience for a console, and instead gives you all the tools you'd expect in a full-blown real time strategy game. The developers didn't innovate much in terms of new features, but they execute the tried and true of the genre very well. As a bargain title sold at a reduced price, you could do far worse than picking up a copy of Command & Destroy.