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C&C RED ALERT 3
Requirements
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Calling Red Alert 3 a guys’ game
is putting it mildly. Part candy-coloured
comic-book bauble, part
classical RTS, Electronic Arts’ Red
Alert 3 (not to be confused with
the 2006 fan-fic C&C Generals: Zero Hour total
conversion of the same name) is old-school all the
way, and that’s meant with affection. From the
cool retro gizmos to its brightly saturated pastels,
everything about the game evokes an imaginative
12-year-old’s intense mental pre-viz of Silver Age
comic panels; Red Alert 3’s palette is so shiny and
high-contrast, it makes Warcraft III look sepia. While
the designers wisely cribbed a few innovations like
veterancy and faction-specific god-power specs
(here christened ‘protocols’) from recent RTS titles
like Company Of Heroes and EA’s own (underrated)
Battle For Middle-Earth II, Red Alert 3 wears the
franchise’s trademark shoot-the-works goofiness
proudly on its sleeve (never have dolphins, trained
circus Soviet warbears, jetpacking psionic ninjettes
and Gemma Atkinson been so gracefully woven into
a single strand).
Though there’s not much in the way of sophisticated character development, the storyline’s silliness is endearingly true to the series. The high-concept premise is highlighted in a funny opening cut-scene: even as victorious Allied forces roll into the Kremlin, two remaining Soviet loyalists, Colonel Cherdenko and General Krukov, reveal an unused secret weapon, a time machine, which they promptly use to drag a reluctant scientist back to 1927, where Albert Einstein is delivering a lecture. Einstein tries the old handshake trick from the original Red Alert, but Cherdenko shoots the surprisingly guileless physicist dead, and as such, prevents nukes from ever being invented (and probably time machines too, but never mind). Upon returning to the Fifties, Cherdenko is further pleased to learn he now outranks Krukov (what happened to his other self in the new timestream is sidestepped) but, on the downside, they now face an updated, more powerful Allied faction on their Western shores, and an even sleeker nanotech-whore Japanese empire to the east. (We briefly wondered why they don’t use the machine again to go back to 1927 and correct their mistake, or for that matter why the time machine is never referenced again; maybe they’re afraid of creating a fourth hempbased Dutch faction until the expansion.)
Each of the three campaigns (Allies, Soviets, and Japanese) consists of nine missions that offer a surprisingly fertile range of exotic locales (Easter Island, Amsterdam, Tokyo, and Mount Rushmore, to name but a few) and varied objectives to fulfil throughout. As in the former entries, the campaigns seem to take place in alternate time-streams. Red Alert 3’s most advertised component is being able to play through the campaigns in co-operative mode with a friend online or by network. In fact, all of the missions are designed around having you fight alongside an ally – even when playing solo, you’re given an AI computer general that you can issue either general strategies or specific attack commands, or simply leave on autopilot (medium and hard AIs tend to turtle and go increasingly vehicular). The co-op focus is interesting, but I wonder how much repeat value the campaigns have for friends, let alone two strangers. It’s not that far removed from hosting a skirmish against comps, although the campaigns offer the only chance you’ll have of seeing Mount Rushmore. The total number of multiplayer maps is 28 (none of which are 4v4), in addition to the 27 single-player ones that you’ll likely play through only once or twice. (we’re sort of a grump about this stuff; as an RTS savant, we’ve always felt that playing against computers both tends to feel less satisfying and teach extremely bad habits.)
The graphics are colourful and striking, if perhaps a bit bloodless (it’s clear that EA was aiming for a T rating: you get subliminal swashes of red, interrogation-by-knife scenes with no visible wounds, and repeated assurances from bickering tutorial tanks that you’re only shooting at target dummies).
The maps are, for the most part, compact and
symmetrical. While there’s not a tactile sense of
place, much of the artwork suggests a festive
theme-park flair as an ironic backdrop to the often
cacophonous carnage, from garrison-able merry-gorounds
and beach-bungalows to wintry storybook
hamlets bedecked with Christmas tree lights.
While the game employs traditional rock-paperscissor mechanics (save for veterancy, units don’t require ‘upgrades’ per se), there’s new emphasis on versatility: every unit features a special ability of some kind and many units fill more than one role. Turrets and buggies fire at air or ground depending on whether they have a human operator (a bit annoyingly, tool-tips inform you in a general way that turrets and vehicles change weapons and target class if garrisoned/driven but doesn’t offer the specifics onscreen). Unlike COH, once you’ve maxed out a ‘protocol’ spec, you can start another of the three chains from tier one, although if you’re doing that well, you’ve likely already won.
The three factions all play slightly differently from one another, although the Japanese are the most quintessentially exotic: their buildings are mobile and can be constructed anywhere, ‘unfurling’ from small trapezoidal pods that are quite frail in transit. Their arsenal includes everything from languid balloon bombs that you can guide in mid-descent to psionic nukes, Imperial warriors with glowing laser-swords, Shogo-like giant robots, tanks that, erm, ‘transform’ into jets, and angrily buzzing hornet swarms of kamikaze fighters. The more utilitarian Soviets are the only faction to lack infiltrators, but compensate with ‘crusher cranes’ that can recycle superfluous vehicles for resources, tank treads that enable you to heal armour by crushing foes (even organic ones, interestingly), and satellite rays that suck enemy vehicles up into space or freeze entire armies in their tracks. A bit curiously, although the Soviets were the time-travel pioneers, the Allies seem to have all the temporal doohickeys, from commando Tanya’s time belt (it sends her five seconds into the past, and doesn’t work if she’s dead) to detonators that materialise from the ether, a ‘chrono-swap’ that lets two of your units switch places anywhere on the battlefield, and a ‘chronosphere’ that teleports units anywhere on the map (it’s lethal to infantry so cram them into a Riptide troop carrier if you don’t want them going messily Philadelphia Experiment). They also get a cryocopter that fires a S.H.R.I.N.K. beam (hmm, wonder what that acronym stands for?), making enemies all the more crushable. Tonally, there’s a lot here that evokes Duke Nukem, even a gorilla-themed fast-food franchise called ‘Burger Kong.’
As in Dawn Of War, neutral structures can be captured by engineers to confer various abilities like extra resources or extended line of sight, and there are grave punishments for neglecting combined arms, but it’s the emphasis on coastal and naval combat that gives Red Alert 3 its unique feel. We’ve had aqua in real-time strategy before, but never as a marquee element – this is the first RTS to make amphibious combat visceral and accessible rather than laborious. Red Alert 3 not only incorporates water into most of its maps but makes it manageable. All three factions feature interesting ways of getting infantry across pesky channels of moisture (our favourite was the Soviet Bullfrog’s ‘man-cannon’ that shoots soldiers over the waves like tennis balls) and many vehicles are amphibious, including MCVs. The effects aren’t entirely realistic: all submerged units remain at equal depth and torpedoes swoosh under apparently solid-looking land masses that even the subs firing them can’t cross, but this is probably the first RTS where you won’t feel the usual groan of dread “Oh god, not a water map…” at the sight of an archipelago on the creation screen. By contrast, land altitude is crucial. A construction yard’s build radius, for instance, doesn’t extend to nearby areas at a higher or lower elevation. Much as we appreciated all this, Red Alert 3’s greatest innovation, hands down, is that for the first time you’re actually shown the specific production time for building each unit.
There are some curious omissions. Despite a wide
variety of unit behaviour settings including a ‘retreatwhile-
firing’ option, there aren’t any formations, just
the usual sloppy single-file columns and inchoate
jumbles. Units don’t appear to attack garrisoned
enemy structures even on Aggressive mode. Pathing
is acceptable for the genre, which is to say that only
sometimes do units take the long, suicidal route.
You can zoom in and out but not much. Unlike COH,
you can’t set rally points for newly built units from
the build menu tabs, only by manually selecting the
individual structures, there’s the aforementioned
vagueness in the tooltip descriptions, and for all the
game’s co-op-centricity, you can’t
choose different AI generals.
The real dealbreaker for many is SecuROM, an anti-piracy DRM software that stays on your system even if you uninstall the game, transmits heaven knows what personal info to EA’s online master servers, and lets you only install the game five times. If you want to reinstall Windows or your hard drive crashes, tough. Never mind that SecuROM punishes only innocent consumers, since true pirates will still find a workaround and now be more motivated to do so. For the love of god, EA, just let us play. Players have made it clear that they feel more strongly about SecuROM than you do about piracy even accounting for your stinginess and paranoia. And stinginess goes against Red Alert 3’s grain.
Big Brother notwithstanding, Red Alert 3 is a solid purchase. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel but it’s not trying to. In its own way, it’s something better than the wheel: a slick, colourful, deep, addictive real-time strategy smorgasbord that gracefully weds nuts-andbolts tactical mechanics to exuberantly daffy pulp imagery and a laidback pyromaniac charm. It’s easily the second most fun you could ever have with a man-cannon and Gemma Atkinson while awake.
Kelly Wand
Though there’s not much in the way of sophisticated character development, the storyline’s silliness is endearingly true to the series. The high-concept premise is highlighted in a funny opening cut-scene: even as victorious Allied forces roll into the Kremlin, two remaining Soviet loyalists, Colonel Cherdenko and General Krukov, reveal an unused secret weapon, a time machine, which they promptly use to drag a reluctant scientist back to 1927, where Albert Einstein is delivering a lecture. Einstein tries the old handshake trick from the original Red Alert, but Cherdenko shoots the surprisingly guileless physicist dead, and as such, prevents nukes from ever being invented (and probably time machines too, but never mind). Upon returning to the Fifties, Cherdenko is further pleased to learn he now outranks Krukov (what happened to his other self in the new timestream is sidestepped) but, on the downside, they now face an updated, more powerful Allied faction on their Western shores, and an even sleeker nanotech-whore Japanese empire to the east. (We briefly wondered why they don’t use the machine again to go back to 1927 and correct their mistake, or for that matter why the time machine is never referenced again; maybe they’re afraid of creating a fourth hempbased Dutch faction until the expansion.)
Each of the three campaigns (Allies, Soviets, and Japanese) consists of nine missions that offer a surprisingly fertile range of exotic locales (Easter Island, Amsterdam, Tokyo, and Mount Rushmore, to name but a few) and varied objectives to fulfil throughout. As in the former entries, the campaigns seem to take place in alternate time-streams. Red Alert 3’s most advertised component is being able to play through the campaigns in co-operative mode with a friend online or by network. In fact, all of the missions are designed around having you fight alongside an ally – even when playing solo, you’re given an AI computer general that you can issue either general strategies or specific attack commands, or simply leave on autopilot (medium and hard AIs tend to turtle and go increasingly vehicular). The co-op focus is interesting, but I wonder how much repeat value the campaigns have for friends, let alone two strangers. It’s not that far removed from hosting a skirmish against comps, although the campaigns offer the only chance you’ll have of seeing Mount Rushmore. The total number of multiplayer maps is 28 (none of which are 4v4), in addition to the 27 single-player ones that you’ll likely play through only once or twice. (we’re sort of a grump about this stuff; as an RTS savant, we’ve always felt that playing against computers both tends to feel less satisfying and teach extremely bad habits.)
The graphics are colourful and striking, if perhaps a bit bloodless (it’s clear that EA was aiming for a T rating: you get subliminal swashes of red, interrogation-by-knife scenes with no visible wounds, and repeated assurances from bickering tutorial tanks that you’re only shooting at target dummies).
While the game employs traditional rock-paperscissor mechanics (save for veterancy, units don’t require ‘upgrades’ per se), there’s new emphasis on versatility: every unit features a special ability of some kind and many units fill more than one role. Turrets and buggies fire at air or ground depending on whether they have a human operator (a bit annoyingly, tool-tips inform you in a general way that turrets and vehicles change weapons and target class if garrisoned/driven but doesn’t offer the specifics onscreen). Unlike COH, once you’ve maxed out a ‘protocol’ spec, you can start another of the three chains from tier one, although if you’re doing that well, you’ve likely already won.
The three factions all play slightly differently from one another, although the Japanese are the most quintessentially exotic: their buildings are mobile and can be constructed anywhere, ‘unfurling’ from small trapezoidal pods that are quite frail in transit. Their arsenal includes everything from languid balloon bombs that you can guide in mid-descent to psionic nukes, Imperial warriors with glowing laser-swords, Shogo-like giant robots, tanks that, erm, ‘transform’ into jets, and angrily buzzing hornet swarms of kamikaze fighters. The more utilitarian Soviets are the only faction to lack infiltrators, but compensate with ‘crusher cranes’ that can recycle superfluous vehicles for resources, tank treads that enable you to heal armour by crushing foes (even organic ones, interestingly), and satellite rays that suck enemy vehicles up into space or freeze entire armies in their tracks. A bit curiously, although the Soviets were the time-travel pioneers, the Allies seem to have all the temporal doohickeys, from commando Tanya’s time belt (it sends her five seconds into the past, and doesn’t work if she’s dead) to detonators that materialise from the ether, a ‘chrono-swap’ that lets two of your units switch places anywhere on the battlefield, and a ‘chronosphere’ that teleports units anywhere on the map (it’s lethal to infantry so cram them into a Riptide troop carrier if you don’t want them going messily Philadelphia Experiment). They also get a cryocopter that fires a S.H.R.I.N.K. beam (hmm, wonder what that acronym stands for?), making enemies all the more crushable. Tonally, there’s a lot here that evokes Duke Nukem, even a gorilla-themed fast-food franchise called ‘Burger Kong.’
As in Dawn Of War, neutral structures can be captured by engineers to confer various abilities like extra resources or extended line of sight, and there are grave punishments for neglecting combined arms, but it’s the emphasis on coastal and naval combat that gives Red Alert 3 its unique feel. We’ve had aqua in real-time strategy before, but never as a marquee element – this is the first RTS to make amphibious combat visceral and accessible rather than laborious. Red Alert 3 not only incorporates water into most of its maps but makes it manageable. All three factions feature interesting ways of getting infantry across pesky channels of moisture (our favourite was the Soviet Bullfrog’s ‘man-cannon’ that shoots soldiers over the waves like tennis balls) and many vehicles are amphibious, including MCVs. The effects aren’t entirely realistic: all submerged units remain at equal depth and torpedoes swoosh under apparently solid-looking land masses that even the subs firing them can’t cross, but this is probably the first RTS where you won’t feel the usual groan of dread “Oh god, not a water map…” at the sight of an archipelago on the creation screen. By contrast, land altitude is crucial. A construction yard’s build radius, for instance, doesn’t extend to nearby areas at a higher or lower elevation. Much as we appreciated all this, Red Alert 3’s greatest innovation, hands down, is that for the first time you’re actually shown the specific production time for building each unit.
The real dealbreaker for many is SecuROM, an anti-piracy DRM software that stays on your system even if you uninstall the game, transmits heaven knows what personal info to EA’s online master servers, and lets you only install the game five times. If you want to reinstall Windows or your hard drive crashes, tough. Never mind that SecuROM punishes only innocent consumers, since true pirates will still find a workaround and now be more motivated to do so. For the love of god, EA, just let us play. Players have made it clear that they feel more strongly about SecuROM than you do about piracy even accounting for your stinginess and paranoia. And stinginess goes against Red Alert 3’s grain.
Big Brother notwithstanding, Red Alert 3 is a solid purchase. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel but it’s not trying to. In its own way, it’s something better than the wheel: a slick, colourful, deep, addictive real-time strategy smorgasbord that gracefully weds nuts-andbolts tactical mechanics to exuberantly daffy pulp imagery and a laidback pyromaniac charm. It’s easily the second most fun you could ever have with a man-cannon and Gemma Atkinson while awake.
Kelly Wand