Note: This game is a standalone version, meaning it does not require Command and Conquer Generals as a base to play and is based on the latest version released on Steam by EA Games at the time of this writing. The online mode was not tested due to requiring third-party tools to work. It has some minor issues starting up, but runs fine when it does, this game review is based on implementing those compatibility fixes. Only covers the Windows version available on Steam, the macOS version is not available there.

Some games were good but could have been expanded, so they get expansions. Sometimes they add more story, or simply more content, and sometimes a bit of both. Command and Conquer Generals: Zero Hour is the latter, but while fun, is far from perfect.

The main plot of the Zero Hour expansion picks up immediately after the ending of the CNC Generals USA campaign. The USA campaign details the continuing fight against the GLA, leading the USA to discover one of the key leaders of the GLA and defeat them. The GLA campaign picks up immediately after the USA campaign, detailing their reformation after losing their former head, culminating in the GLA managing to avenge their defeat at USA hands. The Chinese campaign proceeds after this, as Chinese assets were stolen by the GLA to achieve their victory, and the Chinese humble the GLA in their campaign as payback.

Like all real-time strategy games, the goal is to direct your forces to victory. You must defend your base, direct your forces to defeat the enemy, capture strategic points, and otherwise show better command skills than your opponent to win. On top of the de rigeur skirmish mode and online modes for non-story fights against the computer and other players, Zero Hour features one of its simultaneously best and most disappointing features: General's Challenge. In this mode, you must take control of a specific general (each game faction has one of three to pick from) and then use them to defeat all the other generals in the challenge mode. The generals are all very highly specialized under one niche, like poison weapons, demolitions, airpower, infantry, and so on. The ending challenge is a boss that combines the powers of GLA, USA, and Chinese base factions and forces the player to overcome them despite facing the entire base tech tree of all factions. It's worth noting this has to be the most comedic part of the game, as the generals you fight get some HILARIOUS one-liners and trash talk.

Unfortunately, this is also the most disappointing and rushed part of the game. Of the planned generals (three specialist generals for each faction and three boss generals representing the combined powers of all of their specialist factions from USA/China/GLA), several wound up on the cutting room floor as player opponents. The Chinese Boss general became a generic fusion of the base powers of the USA/China/GLA forces despite the game files containing considerable assets for a GLA and USA boss general. There are mods to reconstruct the rest from the existing assets and fill in the blanks for the remainder, but the base version feels rather thin regardless.

Graphically, the game has a clean yet simple modern world look, with many areas modeled on real-world locations with appropriate set pieces, and while the 3D models for units are a bit simplistic in places, they are distinct and well-animated. The USA radiates a "high tech" aesthetic, the GLA a Middle Eastern grunge look, and the Chinese a brutalist approach typical of their no-nonsense mass assault tactics.

The music and sounds for each force are quite distinctive. The USA voices and music feel like something from a blood-pumping uber-patriotic movie from the 1980s, with self-assured US Army Rangers and chill as dry ice tank and air force pilots. Their music is the kind of stuff you'd set a dramatic movie crescendo with a pro-American outlook to. The Chinese forces have ominous Chinese-themed marches and dirges, all of their voiceovers sounding slightly cliched in Chinese-accented English but radiating bombast and confidence in the glory of the Chinese military. The GLA voiceovers are like a pastiche of every Middle Eastern terrorist cliche with appropriate fanatical warrior lines and their musical score is Middle Eastern themed with a heavy metal undertone to set the tone they are to be taken seriously despite their shoestring budget looks.

In a nice tip of the hat to the series' origin of using full motion videos for mission briefings and cutscenes, Zero Hour features a variation, with newscasters for serial numbers filed off USA/GLA/Chinese friendly news sources reporting on the events of each campaign. This also serves as a nice way for slower computers to catch the player up to speed while loading the level in the background.

The game is controlled by keyboard and mouse, mostly the latter, and the game comes complete with a tutorial to get you started. The user interface is generally intuitive and it's easy to do things like set troop waypoints and navigate the map to sortie forces and deploy structures.

Stability is generally fine once you get past some annoyances as mentioned in the lede. The original was released in the early 2000s, meaning unless your computer is so bad you can barely do word processing, this is likely to run at max and not even stress your PC at all. It is playable on Linux with some tweaks but is not rated for Steam Deck play.

Morally, there are some concerns.

Violence is real-time strategy style, minus blood and gore. While mostly lacking blood and gore, there are some flame, nuclear, and chemical weapons (used by the Chinese for the first two, GLA for the latter) that result in painful screams and bodies turning a single color to indicate burning or being poisoned, but the low detail means this is more implied than super explicit. Most other attacks result in bodies falling and disappearing or stuff exploding if non-humanoid and doing the same. Except for the GLA, the USA and Chinese forces generally try to avoid civilian casualties, though they can result from carelessness or friendly fire. The GLA, however, has no qualms about getting civilians or nonmilitary personnel killed and often makes a point of it in some missions.

Language is going to be mild if there is any at all. Maybe at most a d*mn or h*ll once or twice, mostly used for actual real-world names for weapons, like "Hellfire" missiles and/or military codenames. Sexual content and anything supernatural is nonexistent; this is a no-nonsense, real-world-oriented real-time strategy game. The General's Challenge mode features nothing remarkably different here, with all of the banter being military professional and witty without devolving into profanity.

Morally, the USA and China have the saving grace of trying to operate within the bounds of international law and are fighting in a legitimate response to attacks by a terrorist group on their polities and citizens. The GLA is the villains' campaign by default, given their utter disregard for the niceties of civilized conflict, use of weapons of mass destruction banned under real-world WMD laws, and absolute disregard for the noninvolvement of civilians. Worth noting the Chinese use of nuclear and flame-based weapons is somewhat cruel if not formally illegal in the real world in formal combat situations. The GLA use of poison weapons and terror bombings, on the other hand, is. The "General's Challenge" mode plays out like a friendly wargame, a meta exercise where all the generals basically stage war exercises against one another, and is clearly not meant to be canon nor taken seriously.

Overall, CNC Generals Zero Hour is a fun if simple "modern-day" RTS that is available dirt cheap as part of a bundle on Steam and on EA Play like the base game with an extra fun mode. Morally, it's got some concerns like any military title but is fine for any mature Teen on up. It's not the very best RTS game ever, but it's still just as fun to play as when I first played it nearly two decades ago and thus recommend it highly.