After the gritty, earthy and intense double bill of Supreme Commander and Company of Heroes, the two excellent real-time strategy games that PC owners have been satisfying themselves with over the past six months or so, it's a bit strange that light relief arrives in the form of the granddaddy of the genre. The original Command & Conquer, and its immediate predecessor Dune II, invented the genre as we know it, and both are rightly regarded as classics.

Moving forward just over a decade, Command & Conquer 3 won't be, though. And it's odd. Because while its predecessors were admired for their thrilling mix of tight strategic planning, resource management and workable visual representation of what's going on, the priorities appear to have changed, with the latter now taking centre stage.

On the upside, this leads to some visually arresting battles, and to emphasise this the game's camera defaults to a reasonably close perspective view (although it feels more useful than in the franchise's last outing). Yet it feels as if the strategic elements, while still prominent, have been diluted somewhat to help create a real-time strategy game with an arcade-like feel.

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This is, however, no bad thing, and it certainly makes for some exciting gaming. The principles remain intact, too. The majority of the missions involve mixing management of your resources - through mining tiberium and refining it into the game's currency of sorts - which subsequently allows you to construct buildings, introduce troops, vehicles, defences and suchlike.

As usual, keeping an eye on your structures while trying to take down those of your opponent is the order of the day. Furthermore, you can play the game as the GDI (the good guys) or the Brotherhood of Nod (the, er, not so good guys), and this does mean you get a lot of missions and a solid amount of gaming for your money.

But when the credits finally roll at the end, you can't help feeling a little disappointed. Firstly, at the surprisingly modest ambition of the game. While the real-time settings add an eerie twist (even poor old Big Ben gets a battering), there's little risk-taking going on here, instead an attempt to improve on tried and tested game mechanics. Secondly, it never really squares up to the new leaders of the genre, instead taking a slightly different approach which, while not rendering direct comparisons irrelevant, certainly helps build a case for C&C 3 as a slightly more accessible game.

Yet the truth is that for the real-time strategy fan who's been spoilt quite a lot of late, this is at most the third-best RTS released onto the format in the last year, and there's little compelling reason to choose this ahead of the superior, aforementioned Supreme Commander and Company Of Heroes. We enjoyed it, and you're unlikely to feel short-changed, but Command & Conquer is nonetheless a franchise that really could use a few new ideas.

An arcade-slanted real-time strategy game, and good fun for it. But it's no longer the leader of the genre, and C&C 3 shouldn't be picked ahead of its stronger opponents.