"Standalone expansion pack" isn't a very exciting phrase, but we're going to have to work with the tools we're given, and it's the most apt description for what Command & Conquer 3: Kane's Wrath actually is. On the PC, this was a straightforward expansion pack for a popular real-time strategy game, sold cheaply and requiring the original game to be installed. On consoles, it arrives as a game in its own right - not full-price, thankfully, but a standalone game regardless.
This retreat from the expansion pack concept raises a few issues. For a start, there's the possibility of players who never picked up last year's C&C3 giving this a shot, only to face a truncated and disjointed campaign mode that makes absolutely no sense to anyone who hasn't played the original. We're not saying C&C's story makes sense in general, mind you, but at least the high-camp melodrama normally follows something like a conventional story arc. Kane's Wrath's campaign only lets you play one side, gives you a limited number of missions and spreads them around a 20-year time period spanning a pair of wars from previous games. The stuff of expansion packs, then, not of full games.
