C&C3: Kane’s Wrath is a stand alone expansion, in other words you don't need Tiberium Wars to be able to play it. Still it's advised to first have checked out the previous part in the series as otherwise it will be hard to understand certain dialogues or events.

The entire storyline covers 13 missions and plays over a timespan of 50 years. The first missions tell how Kane after the second Tiberium War managed to get the splintered Brotherhood of Nod back together and started the third Tiberium War. The second part of the campaign plays during that same war and explains a couple of holes in the original storyline. The third and last section then plays after the end of Tiberium Wars and introduces some old familiar characters. Throughout the entire game you don't play as Kane but as the artificial Intelligence LEGION. This AI is a more advanced version of CABAL, the intelligence that at the end of the previous Tiberium War wanted to exterminate the entire human race with his cyborg army.

An expansion with only a new story isn't immediately something worth buying and luckily EA thought the same thing as next to a new single player a lot of improvements have been added.

One of the biggest innovations is the control system. While in the previous C&C you had somewhat of a decent control over your troops and base EA still wasn't satisfied. Result of this is a radial interface that adapts itself depending on your selection. If you haven't selected anything and call out the menu you'll get a general one where you can produce buildings and units. Once you've selected a unit a simple movement of your controller allows you to choose several commands or revert back to the main menu when necessary. The difference with the previous one is that you need to push 50% less buttons before having done a certain selection. One disadvantage that does remain is the loading and saving of a game. When you've lost you have to revert back to the main menu to load an autosave which takes too long. It couldn't have been so difficult to put a simple restart function in the game, could it?

An expansion can't be called and expansion if there aren't any new units present. These can be found in the subfactions, a new feature in the game.
Each side has two subgroups that add some variation to the battlefield. For Nod these are the Black Hand and the Marked for Kane. The first focuses more on the Brotherhood's fanatism and doesn't want to hear anything about technology that doesn't suit them like Stealth tanks. The Marked of Kane on the other hand are a group of old familiars from the previous games that can get great advantages from Tiberium.

GDI have the Steel Talon and ZOCOM. The first group uses the Walker technology from the second Tiberium War, amongst which the famous Wolverines and Titans. The second group had as goal to operate independent in heavily infected Tiberium zones and has some of the most advanced technologies.

Finally there are the Scrin, which have the subfactions Reaper-17 and Traveler-59. Reaper-17 has some of the most powerful units and is best suited for players that love doing an all-out assault on a base. Traveler-59 on the other hand is less offensive but compensates by taking over enemy units.

Next to all these subfactions each race also has a new super unit. For GDI this is the MARV which can be seen as a giant tank that with the necessary upgrades can collect Tiberium. Nod has the Redeemer which is an upgraded Avatar and can turn enemy units against each other, and finally there's the Eradicator Hexapod from the Scrin which next to a ton of firepower also can transform wreckages of destroyed vehicles into money. The three super units can also be populated by infantry units so that you can alter them with different weaponry depending on the enemy's army.

A story in a game may be fun, but sometimes you don't need a reason to get busy and this can be done in Kane's Challenge and the well-known Skirmish option. Kane's Challenge is the Xbox360 version of the Global Conquest mode on PC where you have ten predefined maps per faction. This means a total of 90 challenges that await you as there are nine factions present. Xbox Live is of course also supported and just like in the previous game you can play with a maximum of four players in several modes going from simple Deathmatch to Capture the Flag and King of the Hill.

With a choice of over 50 maps, including a bunch new ones, you'll have plenty of choice. Sadly enough the online experience isn't always as stable, disconnection can often happen if you're unlucky. The irritating part is that players who are losing can cause a disconnect to not get an additional loss on their profile which makes that the winning player also doesn't receive a win. The chance that a new patch arrives is small as EA has always had the tendency to concentrate on the future and sadly enough that's called Red Alert 3 now.

Graphically the game is the same as its big brother Tiberium Wars, which doesn't come as a surprise for an expansion. The engine used is still the SAGE engine which comes from C&C: Renegade and received several upgrades over the years. What does get noticed is that when a huge amount of units are on-screen, the framerate starts to suffer which is a disappointment as the game doesn't really push the Xbox360 to its limits. The famous FMVs are present again and make for a special atmosphere contrary to the many in-game and computer generated movies of the previous years.

The game's music is good but can't compete with the soundtrack of previous C&C games produced by Frank Klepacki. Luckily this famous artist will be doing his thing again in Red Alert 3. The acting in the cut-scenes is as usual mildly overdone but this isn't a problem as it's part of the setting of the game. The sounds of the units fit their design and won't make for any surprises.