o help them, Electronic Arts is going to keep on pounding this square peg into a round hole until it goes in through sheer brute force. I applaud the developers’ efforts at refining the way players interact with a real-time strategy title via gamepad, but it’s going to take a serious break from the genre’s PC roots to create a good RTS title on console. Kane’s Wrath, with its weak campaign and questionable unit AI, is not that game.

This expansion’s greatest selling point on Xbox 360 is a reworked control scheme that allows you to pull up Mass Effect-style radial menus via the left trigger. These contextual interfaces make it much easier to manage your base building, production queues, and global powers. It’s a step in the right direction, to be sure, but Kane’s Wrath’s underlying design prevents the game from being anything special.

While the single-player campaign was mediocre on PC, it’s downright bad on 360. The constant need to micromanage Saboteurs to complete objectives highlights everything that’s wrong with the interface, and the missions never push the player to engage in what C&C 3 does best: crushing enemies under an unstoppable wave of whichever unit(s) you focus on.

When you have access to the precision offered by a mouse/keyboard setup, babysitting your forces to minimize the impact of their idiotic AI and pathfinding is an annoying chore. On a gamepad, it’s a fun-killing nightmare. Don’t bother creating combined-arms groups of different units; the faster ones will jump ahead to be slaughtered while the slower troops are still puttering along halfway across the map. The most effective strategy is usually to grab your entire army and baby-step them across the landscape using a series of short attack-move orders – anything else generally results in your units competing to see who can make the least effective use of their abilities.

Online play is as good as we’ve seen out of the genre on console, mostly because of the improved controls, but C&C 3’s reliance on hard counters, unit specials, and speedy expansion is a terrible fit for the limitations of the gamepad interface. Kane’s Wrath executes its mediocre ideas solidly, but that doesn’t make it any more fun to play.