Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 Review

By Quintin Smith Published 3 November, 2008

Brotherhood and freedom!

Version tested: PC

Somebody needs to put a stop to the Red Alert games. Not because their quality is going downhill, mind. Red Alert 3's an awesome continuation of the series, and the decision to make all three of its campaigns co-operative affairs is the kind of game design that makes you pray whoever it was that came up with the idea got promoted and laid on the same day. It's just that with every new Red Alert game the series drops further into the gutter. The cheesy plot, the unbelievable national stereotypes, the comic book science, the cleavage, the animals that act as improbably effective military units, all of it is increasing at an exponential rate. I mean, they cannot keep this up. Unless someone stops them, Red Alert 4 is going to come out one day and it's going to be a DVD containing nothing but an hour-long video of William H. Macy dancing on a topless Steve Buscemi. One of them will probably have a Russian hat on or something.

For the moment though, Red Alert 3 is still just about holding it together. The plot begins with the Soviets using a prototype time machine to go back to the beginning of the 20th century to kill Einstein, thereby stopping him from developing powerful super-weapons for the Allies. The Soviet top brass return to a future where their nation is kicking ass and taking names, although for some reason the death of Einstein also means the Japanese, now known as the Empire of the Rising Sun, are a nanotechnology-equipped world power (and third playable side).

But we can talk about the Japanese in a bit. As a feature they're completely eclipsed by the new co-op nature of the game's three campaigns. This isn't just the option to play through each of the game's missions with a friend; all of the levels are designed from the ground up for two people, and if you're playing alone then a subservient AI general fills the gap and a simple order system opens up so you can boss him around.

'Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3' Screenshot 1

The Soviet squid is conspicuous by its absence and replaced by the horrible War Bears, which are like Care Bears if the Care Bears only cared about eating your face.

But you really don't want to play alone. Unless you honestly vomit in your own mouth a little bit on contact with another human being, you want to play this game co-op. It just works, and that shouldn't surprise anyone who's ever tried teaming up with friends to take on hard AI in Dawn of War, Sins of a Solar Empire or... well, almost every RTS ever made, come to think of it. And RTS teamwork against the computer only gets more fun when you've got set-pieces and personal limitations thrown into the mix. Missions in RA3 might limit the ability to build base defences to one player, another might order you to capture a distant island when only one of you can build land units and the other's stuck with submarines and aerial transports. And throughout all of it the two of you get to experience the laugh-out-loud corny voice acting, seeing the cute animations of your troops for the first time and the advent calendar-like drip-feed of new abilities and units. Unless you load up skirmish mode first of course, in which case in traditional RTS fashion the tech tree's completely unlocked and you can see everything RA3 has to offer in under fifteen minutes. Your call.

As to the mechanics of the series, to its credit RA3 tries to act as more of an overhaul than an update. All buildings that don't produce ground units can now be built on water (including, weirdly, ore refineries, which then harvest from the occasional floating ore mines you'll find), and tons of vehicles are now amphibious and plenty of infantry can swim. But that's the most boring of the new tricks at your troops' disposal, as almost everything now has at least one special ability or weapon that you can activate. You've got you've got war cries, laser painters, power-draining missiles, tractor beams, freezing beams, shrinking beams, psychic levitation, first-aid tent deployment, black-hole armour... Even the most basic infantry on each side gets in on the action. The Soviet Conscripts can toggle between AK-47s and Molotov cocktails, the Allied Peacekeepers can take out cumbersome riot shields and the Empire of the Rising Sun's Imperial Warriors can whip out No More Heroes style beam katanas.

And then you've got your protocol weapons. As a map goes on you'll gradually earn points that can be spent in a simple faction-specific tech tree, unlocking unit upgrades and support attacks which can be used to cause havoc anywhere on the map every few minutes. And even the starting protocol weapons for each side are ludicrous. The Allies can use chronosphere technology to swap the location of any two units on the map, the Empire of the Rising Sun can automatically strap all their vehicles with explosives so they blow up when close to death and the Soviets get a satellite that uses a magnetic beam to suck enemy vehicles up into space.

If right now you're thinking that Red Alert 2 was chaotic enough already and that all this new stuff might be overkill, you're probably right. Fun as all the new toys are, a consequence of them is that the micromanagement is often demanding to the point of being frustrating. Red Alert was never a slow-paced RTS, and while RA3 softens the beginning of matches by giving every side immediate access to base-defence turrets that are way more powerful than any starting unit, this still a fast game. Once a map gets busy, the fact that all of your units have a special ability that you have to manually activate can seem like a cruel joke, not least because getting the timing right when using it often means just watching that unit and waiting for the right moment. Once you've factored in protocol weapons and the fact that buildings and units are no longer restricted to land or sea, well... The kind thing to do here is call matches of RA3 unpredictable, although you could just as easily be mean and call them confused and fiddly.

'Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3' Screenshot 2

It's kinda sorta almost worth buying the game for the brilliant tutorials. And yet really not.

And yet you can't put this chaos down as an accident and call it feature-creep, getting in the way of the rock-paper-scissors system that made the original game work. EA seems to be doing this deliberately. So many of the new units are based around the idea of causing havoc, and boast rapid movement and surprise attacks. For example, the Japanese have mecha units that can transform from ground-pounding robots into jets and helicopters, and the buildings on their side all start as little flat-packed amphibious vehicles which can be deployed anywhere on the map with no regard for range or power. And the Soviets now have the Bullfrog and the Sickle, the former being an APC which unloads troops by firing them out of a cannon and the latter being a flea-like vehicle that can jump huge distances.

More than anything else it feels like the same giggly attitude you see in Red Alert 3's cut-scenes is leaking into the strategy. When an RTS is as unpredictable as this it becomes less about scheming and resource management and even more about simply reacting, and that's not going to be to everyone's taste. That said, everyone loves the sweet taste of co-op, so if you've got a friend who's a fan of either RTS games or cleavage (or both!), Red Alert 3 can and will show you a very good time indeed.

8 / 10

Read the Eurogamer.net scoring policy
Picture of Quintin.

About Quintin Smith

Read more articles from Quintin by visiting the Quintin Smith archive page.

You may also like...

Comments (42) Latest comment 3 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Haloboy #1 3 years ago

    Red Alert games have always been the best C&C has to offer.

    FINISH THE FIGHT!

  • SuperBas #2 3 years ago

    You've got you've got war cries

    What's this? A grammatical error on EG? First time I spot one of those.
    Edited by 2 at 03/11/08 @ 09:12

  • yrg_autumn #3 3 years ago

    i'd go more with "occasionally campy, occasionally bad" acting...

  • TonyB #4 3 years ago

    Forget this game, I want an hour-long video of William H. Macy dancing on a topless Steve Buscemi.

  • Pirotic #5 3 years ago

    I'd have to disagree with the reviewer on this one.

    First of all the protocol weapons all start off much weaker than the super weapons of Red Alert 2, and you only get protocol weapons by gaining enough xp via killing other units. So if you sit around waiting to react, you'll be the first player out of the game. By the 4th/5th upgrade the protocol weapons are pretty nasty, but by this point you've probably been playing long enough to reach a near stalemate with whatever enemy you have left, and so it rewards players who go out looking for kills rather than turtling and prolonging defeat. It's more there to keep the end game exciting than to interfere too much with the strategy which must come before it.

    In the single player (well, co-op) mode it's balanced quite nicely as well, you can hang back and defend if you want to knowing all the kills you'll rack up can eventually be put towards destroying the AI from orbit, but the AI often has a super weapon of it's own which 'must be destroyed' before the countdown zeroes, which forces even the most avid turtler such as myself to plan a daring assault.

    Online everything can be toggled on and off, so again, die hard strategists turn most of the super weapons off which was was also the case with Red Alert 2.

    The final score is probably about right. I'd of given it a 9 but horses for courses.

  • Setaro #6 3 years ago

    I didn't see any mention of the music in the review. I'm listening to the OST now, and christ, Frank Klepacki has absolutely outdone himself, it's awesome. This may just surpass the OST from the original C&C.

  • busboy33 #7 3 years ago

    This has Tim Curry, a pleathora of invitingly displayed boobies, and armored dolphins. I didn't even realize I was supposed to be playing until 20 minutes in.
    Only the aforementioned Macy/Buscemi nude dancing could possibly make this more full of win.

  • jaxon58 #8 3 years ago

    Worth 8 points just for the Russian lady who gives you the orders/horn.


  • FaceOmeter #9 3 years ago

    This has Tim Curry, a pleathora of invitingly displayed boobies, and armored dolphins. I didn't even realize I was supposed to be playing until 20 minutes in.

    Brilliant.

    Sometimes during the RA2 days I did miss the more measured ridiculousness of Red Alert 1, but on balance I think I can safely say SOLD!!!!!111one

  • Genji #10 3 years ago

    Is that Tim Curry in the photograph?

    If so, \o/

    I'm not buying this, but still, \o/

  • Destrin #11 3 years ago

    Post deleted at 12:47:09 13-12-2011

  • DFawkes #12 3 years ago

    I didn't fancy this at all, but I do like co-op stuff, I might even invest in this one.

    What's with C&C naming and continuity though, I don't get it.

  • Nithron #13 3 years ago

    It's a shame, I wanna buy this, but... The DRM. Oh the humanity!

    Why don't you want my money EA? Why?

  • krudd #14 3 years ago

    I am quite disappointed with this (and was the same with C&C3) ... I think I have actually lost my love of the RTS! .. Though I'm still extremely excited for Empire(s?): Total War! So maybe it's just me that's broken on the whole campiness of it all!

  • Evolution #15 3 years ago

    "What's with C&C naming and continuity though"

    Red Alert is a separate universe from the "Tiberium" games, and Generals is best forgotten.

    Anything with Tim Curry cannot be bad.

  • udat #16 3 years ago

    There's all this talk of boobies, and so on, yet the screenshot gallery is completely devoid of them. This is not right.

  • brinlarden #17 3 years ago

    CHRIST! this was a violent review wasn't it?!

    im sweating.

  • Fixxxer #18 3 years ago

    From the front page it looks as if Rafa Benitez makes an appearance!

    In which case I can only assume the Command and Conquer title is ironic.

  • carlosdelondres_08 #19 3 years ago

    The perfect antidote to the (slight ;-) bleakness of Fallout and Far Cry - how can you not love firing a hot pant clad sniper into battle from your Man Cannon...

    The Serious Sam of RTS...

  • BobsUncle #20 3 years ago

    "an APC which unloads troops by firing them out of a cannon"

    I'm not sure if this is brilliant or unbelievably fucking stupid.

  • SEVQA #21 3 years ago

    Tim Curry rocked in Legend as the devil demon - I think he was in the pick of destiny too! lol

  • Pulsar_t #22 3 years ago

    Tim Curry? And no love for Jonathan Pryce? I mean Pryce > Curry!

    I didn't see any mention of the music in the review. I'm listening to the OST now, and christ, Frank Klepacki has absolutely outdone himself, it's awesome. This may just surpass the OST from the original C&C.

    Um, Klepacki didn't do the music, only the Hellmarch piece. For more info visit this wiki

    [link url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_%26_Conquer:_ Red_Alert_3_(soundtrack)
    ]http://en .wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_%26...[/link]

  • dacicus #23 3 years ago

    A bit of history: the Red Alert 1 is an alternate for the C&C universe. In the first Red Alert, Einstein goes back in time and eliminates Adolf Hitler. Years later, you can find Kane, who found Einstein's Time Machine, at the Soviet's side in a high ranking position, scheming for the time when NOD will control the russian territory ( NOD always had strong support in Russia, Eastern Europe and the african countries).
    Some of the older gamer might remember the motto:
    "He who controls the past commands the future. He who commands the future conquers the past."
    So the C&C name was initially justified. Right now, I'm not sure anymore, but I'd really like to see Kane in a comeback in the RA universe.
    As for Generals, yes that should be forgotten. Or the C&C removed from the title, because the game was pretty good in MP, but had no ties with the C&C whatsoever.

  • EzyRyder #24 3 years ago

    Indeed Generals was an acceptable MP game but in no way tied to the C&C franchise

  • RedSparrows #25 3 years ago

    Not played this yet, but I have to share the sentiment of the first paragraph. Like the series, but my interest has gone down as the numbers have gone up. Nowt wrong with some silliness, but there's nowt right with dolphins, squids and any new ones for this.

    Still, probably will love it.

  • schachmatt #26 3 years ago

    This review should have been written by two reviewers cooperatively.

  • Maximilian #27 3 years ago

    This review should have been written by two reviewers cooperatively.

  • viper_h #28 3 years ago

    I bought this for Gemma Atkinson.

    True story.

  • FaceOmeter #29 3 years ago

    Maximilian - my respect

    I love how this game has attracted 30 comments whilst the GoW 2 thread is on 250+ after slightly less time up. PCs forever!

  • dacicus #30 3 years ago

    Well, the DRM and the single player campaign in CO-OP didn't helped much. The CO-OP play kind of defeats the purpose to name Single Player the Single Player part of the campaign....

  • Tehren #31 3 years ago

    The PC is dead. Well, one of mine is. Anyone got a spare 550W PSU lying around.

    Death to C&C Generals. What a load of absolute bollox.

    DRM etc.

  • dacicus #32 3 years ago

    Nah! PC is just comatose due to some serious mishandling and fan alienation. Otherwise, he's just peachy, as Gemma Atkinson would try to tell you with a strange english accent...

  • frostcircus #33 3 years ago

    Absolute best opening paragraph on the site. And since 90% of the internet's great opening paragraphs are to be found on this site, this says a lot.

  • EzyRyder #34 3 years ago

    The fact that there are more posts here in Eurogamer doesn't surprise me. At the end of the day the UK is mainly a console nation.

  • majinraptor #35 3 years ago

    i dont understand y people say red alert is ridiculous. just abt any game is ridiculous. u think war bears are weird??? wht abt ridin a bloody dragon in warcraft or fightin the undead. just cant understand y RA is tagged as the ridiculous RTS. No one ever said RA was gonna be a realistic game. it s obviously fantasy/sci fi based as they keep changin stuff by goin bak in time..

    i finished the campaigns and i ve been playin online for a couple of days and this game is awesome!!!! been a RA fan ever since RA1(duh..) and this game doesnt disappoint. the reviewer should get his facts straight abt a game before reviewin. also like some1 mentioned earlier the music in this game is absolutely stunnin.... it actually stands out. i got the ost for RA3 cus it s tht damn good.

  • The12thMonkey #36 3 years ago

    Blasted through the Allies and Soviets over the weekend, and most of the Empire campaign. I wish they'd been longer, but the entertainment value was high most of the way through. Not yet fired up co-op, mainly because my mate doesn't have the game yet >.>

  • Stokkolm #37 3 years ago

    So many people complained about the ridiculousness of the cutscenes and units (including the reviewer), but they are made so on porpose. Most RTS games take themselves to serious, and RA3 just makes fun of them coming with something more ridiculous. Think it Team Fortress' RTS counterpart.

    And I can't believe the soundtrack hasn't been mentioned, I dare to say it's at least as good as Tiberian Dawn's, thus making it one of the best OSTs ever!

    If Quintin gave it an 8 without fully getting it, it makes me think that otherwise it would have gave it a 10 :) Though I think 8 is a fair score, an outstanding soundtrack and sarcastic aproach can't make up the fact that the gampeplay, though fun, does not bring anything fresh to the genre beside the co-op campaign.

  • Nill #38 3 years ago

    No mention of the 30 frames per second-cap, eh?

    Disappointing, as it completely destroys the game.

  • RedSparrows #39 3 years ago

    Majinraptor, it's because it doesn't sit well (for me) in the context of the setting. Warcraft is obviously fantasy. Red Alert is too, but I preferred 1 over 2 and the look of 3. I know it's supposed to be insane, but it doesn't work for me. I don't 'buy' it.

  • FaceOmeter #40 3 years ago

    Nill: It honestly doesn't feel destroyed to my plebian eyes - I didn't know about the 30fps cap and it looked gorgeous to me

  • Bluetooth #41 3 years ago

    Better than C+C3 Tiberium Wars?

  • frudgymonk #42 3 years ago

    To the guy who said Frank Klepacki has outdone himself on RA3.... what are you talking about????? Klepacki did about 2 tracks out 60 for RA3. The rest is by Tim Wynn and James Hannigan. Klepacki just did HM3 and Grinder 2. Two nice tracks but for chrissakes get your facts right.