Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 Review

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Empire units are equally inventive, and draw heavily on geek-friendly science-fiction motifs. Giant stomping mecha called King Oni announce their arrival by demanding to know who has woken them from their technological slumber, while Transformer-styled vehicles free you up from the rigid land/sea/air approach of old. The Allies and Soviets get to taste some of this freedom as well; there are amphibious vehicles on all sides, as well as the option to build bases and power stations on the water.

All are realised in wonderful dinky detail and, unlike some of its rivals, Red Alert 3 holds a steady frame-rate even when your unit cap is maxed out with 50 soldiers and vehicles trampling all over the map. It dips occasionally - most noticeably in rendering the shadows of parachutists, for some reason - but the overall graphical sheen makes up for these small wobbles. The water effects are especially lovely, as are the countless little animations for each of your tiny warriors.

And, of course, there are the cut-scenes, and they're deliriously cheesy even by the outrageous standards set in previous Red Alerts. It's hard to dislike a game where Jonathan Price, Peter Stormare and JK Simmons rub virtual shoulders with cult hams like George Takei, Andrew Divoff and Tim Curry (who seems to be turning into Jeremy Beadle). Round it out with the expected bevy of cheesecake starlets, glamour models, the UFC's Randy Couture and David bloody Hasselhoff and you've got the sort of experience that keeps you hooked through sheer incredulity.

It's just a shame that getting to the next scenery-chewing movie clip is sometimes your prime motivation for persisting. All too often in the campaign the only route to success is to follow orders, using rigidly defined resources, which leaves you little room to tackle any deeper strategy than which direction to spam the enemy from. There's also an often depressing focus on guiding solitary female commandos around miniature map areas, sections which abandon strategy for a rather odd point-and-click version of Gauntlet. There are some decent scenarios sprinkled throughout the game, but only a few really allow you to really dig down into the full spread of tactical options.

Resources are fairly plentiful, and mostly automated, so there's very little grinding.

The campaign mode in the PC version, of course, was rescued by the quite brilliant decision to make every level a co-op experience, with an AI co-commander joining you if you weren't playing with a human friend. The same is true on Xbox 360, but slightly borked by the decision to only allow co-op play with someone on your Friends list. There doesn't seem to be any logical reason for this restriction, and it rather cuts the legs off a potentially fun feature. Elsewhere there's the traditional skirmish multiplayer where you'll get the option of playing against random human foes, as well as freedom to actually formulate real strategy, free from the linearity of mission objectives.