Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3 is a real-time strategy game similar to Starcraft, Age of Empires, and a slew of other Command and Conquer games. You harvest money to build structures and units to overrun your enemies. There are three unique factions and battles take place over land, sea, and air.
As a fan of the Command and Conquer series, I was sold on this game when I heard that it has 2 player coop in the campaign mode. And indeed it does! And it is quite good. But there are some nagging issues.
The most important thing to know is that if you plan on playing the coop campaign over LAN with another person, everyone MUST have an active Internet connection. The game FORCES you to login to the EA authentication server before you can play a campaign game with others EVEN ON YOUR OWN LAN. This means that when my Internet is down I can't play the campaign with Tina while she is sitting right next to me. What in the hell kind of brain dead retardo design is that?
This also means if THEIR servers are down we can't play together. Or even if they are BUSY. Yes, when we were trying to play through the campaign, it was like pulling teeth trying to both authenticate and go through the terrible network interface to connect to each other. The game would often just hang there for minutes.
Why is it that those who pay full price have to suffer through this bullshit while some twat that pirated it has probably bypassed all this jackassery? It's ridiculous. I am going to actively look for crap like this before I spend another dime on a C&C game.
On the plus side, the skirmish mode is independent of this anal-rific design. There really aren't that many maps and the maximum number of players is capped at six. However, the maps are mostly pretty decent and provide a good variety to test your strategies.
The campaign is very good. You can actually start out with a very well done tutorial (1 player) to learn the basics. Probably one of the best tutorials I've seen in some time. Then, you can play any of the 3 faction campaigns (generally, you want to do them in order - Soviet, Allies, Rising Sun).
Every mission in campaign mode supports 2 players. If you are going solo, the computer AI will get your back and it holds its own quite well without taking away too much of the glory from your own escapades. But make no mistake, 2 player coop is where it is at. You have your own starting bases, but your resources are pooled together. You can also build on your teammate's base. The roles and goals you each have are often separate, but you are able to support and cover weaknesses in your partner's army as needed. In fact, I plan on playing the campaign a second time with Tina with our roles reversed.
There are little live-action cut scenes that develop the story between missions. They are actually pretty good with some entertaining acting and decent lines. I enjoyed watching them quite a bit. They also give you tactical overviews of the upcoming mission, which are welcome.
The music in this game is excellent. Personally, I think this is somewhere around the second or third best soundtracks of all the C&C games, only falling behind the original C&C stellar score and sitting pretty close to the Generals soundtrack. There is a lot of variety and some of the tracks will really pump you up for the action. It needs to be mentioned that they actually directed the sound a bit so that the music kind of starts out innocuous while you are doing early base development and scouting, but cranks up as soon as hostilities commence. This is something that many developers overlook. Sound and voice work is also top notch.
The graphics are of course very good. They don't break any barriers of technology, but you'll see plenty of pretty explosions and unit animations without needing a powerhouse computer to play it.
I'm not really a big fan of the units. There is a definite comical tone mixed in with the serious and to me that seems a bit awkward. But they cover all the staples while mixing up some interesting abilities and specialties. Some people may find the odd units rather endearing.
The game's stability is above average, but not great. We get random crashes maybe 15% of the time. This is actually unacceptable, but I've kind of gotten used to this kind of performance from previous C&C games.
Overall presentation is a mixed bag. The title screen is really cool (and it actually lets you skip most of the EA logo garbage). The cut scenes, as mentioned earlier, are great. But then there are just dumb stupid things that just make you scratch your head how they got through QC. The multiplayer setup is a pain. The transition from match to match is terrible (get ready to see a lot of "you have been signed out" error messages). The game doesn't even remember your last skirmish settings. Come on guys, play Starcraft once just to learn the basics of these things. It was done better 11 years ago...
To me, this game is overall very good with just a few extremely annoying flaws that keep it from reaching true greatness. I give the single-player an 8.25. The coop rating shoots to
8.75. It actually deserves to be a little bit higher due to the fantastic coop campaign, but the forced network issues and stability problems are as welcome as a kick in the nards.
This is a great game for couples or friends that enjoy RTS games and teamwork... once it finally lets you connect to each other.
