Parents' Guide to Command & Conquer Rivals

It's been years since the last time gamers have fought in the Tiberium Wars of EA's popular strategy series, but this mobile version shoots a lot of blanks with its gameplay. Command & Conquer Rivals is a free-to-play competitive player-versus-player entry, built from the ground up for mobile devices. Fans of the franchise will feel right at home at first, with instantly recognizable characters and that distinct Command & Conquer style. But while the game is surprisingly well designed and plays nicely in the portable environment, there are a few major hurdles keeping it from restoring the series to its former glory.

The biggest problem facing Command & Conquer Rivals is that its free-to-play model feels completely broken. After getting through the tutorial and early stages, the game seems to frustratingly and almost unfairly crank up the difficulty. This is because your initial army is relatively weak, and it takes a lot of gameplay to level your existing units and earn new and better troops. This can be easily bypassed by spending actual money. Unfortunately, this fosters more of a pay-to-win formula, since the game focuses on real-world opponents and many of them have already built powerful armies. This pushes players to spend even more money just to compete, and the cycle continues until it feels like the only way to success is to break the proverbial bank with microtransactions.