RED ALERT 3 GDLK CHEESE

The Command and Conquer series has had a long and illustrious history.    Its trademarks are visceral, mindless, fast paced action combined with cheesy and over the top full motion video cut scenes.   Spamming out units and blowing shit up via weapons of mass destruction is what every C&C game promises.    And boy does it always deliver!    Red Alert 3 carries on the proud tradition of its forefathers with giant robots


ninjas

scantily clad commandos, and war bears.    Yeah, war bears!



   That’s just one step away from bear calvary!    Perhaps in the expansion?     Not only that, you get to build shit ON TOP OF THE WATER!  

 In addition, the game has eschewed its bargain budget B actors in favor of an all star cast.    You’ve got hot babes like Kelly Hu and Jenny McCarthy, joined by legendary actors like George Takei , Andrew Divoff, and JK Simmons.    Yeah that’s right, they got Lieutenant Commander Sulu of the starship Excelsior, the Wishmaster, AND J Jonah Jameson to star in the same game!    Holy shit!    They even threw in UFC champion Randy “The Natural” Couture.   How awesome is that?     The only weak chain in this cast is MMA fighter Gina Carano, who doesn’t say a single word throughout the entire game.   She probably couldn’t figure out how to do a Russian accent.

These legendary actors and models star in the full motion video cutscenes in between levels, and serve as talking heads during the in game cutscenes.    Everything is incredibly sexist and racist, which makes it all the more awesome.  The women are scantily clad in short skirts, high heels, and low cut blouses that expose their cleavage.    To say that they are easy on the eyes is an understatement.    Most of the characters speak in a fake and stereotypical British, Russian, or Japanese accent.   Normally the bane of straight to DVD movies (Hi Mummy 3: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor), these accents are entirely appropriate in this context.   What makes all this campy and tongue-in-cheek dialogue work is that the cast know they are here to have a good time and not take themselves too seriously.   They all went in with the mind-set that nobody would be winning any Oscars.   After all, they probably took one glance at the script and realized what they were in for.

            The single player campaign has your typical forgettable and throw-away story.     It involves the Soviets using a time machine (sans flux capacitor) to travel back in time to assassinate Albert Einstein.   The catastrophic rift in the space time continuum results in Japan becoming a superpower and owning everyone with their giant robots.    In other words, it’s  a thinly veiled excuse to kill things, blow shit up, and introduce a new faction:   The Empire of the Rising Sun.           

Each campaign has a mutually exclusive storyline, meaning that you take each faction to ultimate victory over the others.     There are only nine levels for each faction campaign.    Of course, since the first few levels for each faction consist of your standard “tutorial” fluff that introduce you to your units, this results in each campaign feeling like its over before it even started.    This problem is compounded by the fact that most of the levels themselves feel quite short, and very few of them require longer than an hour to beat, thus missing that epic feel that levels in other C&C games have had.     Of course, since most people play RTS for the multiplayer, this may not be a big problem.   I however, have always been a huge fan of the singe player component of the C&C series, so I was a bit disappointed.   

Luckily, all is not lost.    One of the coolest new features is that the campaigns are designed with co-op in mind.    A co-commander ally will be helping you out on every level.    They are AI controlled by default, but you can find a friend who can play along.     This is a very cool idea, and hopefully more games will offer this feature in the future.    However, the multiplayer implementation isn’t all that good.    Trying to find a stranger to join your game is not easy.     Unlike on battle.net where you create a game and people join, you must manually (and randomly) ask people to join.     It feels like I’m propositioning street hookers in front of the local 7-11.   Not the best user experience.    I definitely like the idea of co-op campaigns though; the idea has plenty of potential.     

Not to mention, playing with an AI ally isn’t so bad.    Of course, once in a blue moon the AI gets into some kind of bad state, where it just sits around and does nothing.    But path finding issues have plagued RTS since the dawn of time, so the fact that your AI ally sometimes ends up getting a lobotomy shouldn’t be that big of a shock (Oh and FYI, path finding issues plague this game as well).   Now, normally the AI ally is quite dependable.    There’s even an interface with which you can command them.     You can order your ally to attack an area immediately with all available forces, or to first build up an army and then attack.  You can also order them to take up position at a specific area, or you can give them autonomy and let them command themselves and do whatever the hell they want (which is usually fairly competent).      

 The gameplay itself is quite fun.    However, one of the biggest problems with C&C (or plusses, depending on how you look at it), is that every game quickly degenerated into a contest of who could spam out more units.    Lower tier units such as infantry tended to be worthless and died far too easily.   As a result, strategy and tactics would quickly get thrown out the window in favor of pumping out mammoth tanks.    However, the designers introduced some key changes to make micro and macro more important aspects of multiplayer skirmishes.    

On the micro side, every unit has a special ability that must be manually activated.      In addition, you get a number of support powers that you can deploy on the battlefield.    Some deal direct damage, others serve as buffs.     They each have their own recharge times.    This provides the player with a diverse set of tactical combinations.     

To make macro more important, several changes have been made, the key one being to the economy: resource collection is now done at ore mines, rather than mining ore that was scattered across the map as in previous games.    Only one ore collector is allowed in a mine at a time, so if you build too many collectors they will get bottlenecked.    What this prevents you from doing is spamming out a ton of ore collectors, getting a ton of cash, and spamming out units.     By limiting the rate at which you can mine ore, it makes managing your economy all the more important.    True, it does slow down the pace of the game, but that was the intention.   

 Naval battle also plays a much larger role in this game.     Previous games featured naval yards and naval units.   In Red Alert 3, many buildings, including air fields, construction yards, and static defenses, can now be built on top of the water.    Ore mines can now be found in the ocean as well, which now makes contesting strategic spots on the ocean all that much more important.     As a result, land, sea, and air are now all viable attack vectors.   To capitalize on this, the developers have made a number of units amphibious.    This added flexibility provides the creative player with many strategic and tactical possibilities.

The three new factions are relatively symmetric, at least compared to a game such as Starcraft.     All three feature a vulnerable, slow moving, long range artillery unit.    All three feature a powerful, tier three naval unit with lots of hit points that deals shitloads of damage.   All three have your standard engineer, infantry, and anti vehicle infantry.  All three have war factories, ore refineries, naval yards, barracks, and so on.    There are enough differences between the three to keep things interesting though.   Obviously at higher levels of play, these differences manifest themselves more clearly. As mentioned before, the unique special abilities of every unit help keep them distinct.   The three factions also have different styles of support powers.   The Soviets have more direct damage type powers, such as orbital strikes.     The Allies provide more buffs.   The Aeronautics upgrade improves aircraft units, and the cryshot freezes enemies.    The Japanese provide a mix of direct damage and buffs.

The three factions also have different methods of building as well.   The Allies use your typical C&C deployment method.    You click on the building you want, and after construction is completed, you then click on the map where you want it to appear.    This allows them to do things such as drop a turret on top of an attacking army out of the blue.   Of course, the building must appear within your base.   The Soviets on the other hand, require you to choose where you want to build beforehand.    The building goes up in real time, exposing the building to enemy attack as its being constructed.    The Japanese have the most tedious method of construction.    The construction yard merely produces mobile “cores” that you must manually move and then unpack at the desired location.    These cores are incredibly vulnerable.    However on the flip side, expansion for them is a breeze, as they can literally build anywhere they want to.

    I don’t play Red Alert 3 competitively, but by lurking various forums it sounds like there are still balance issues concerning unit spam, despite all the efforts of the developers.     Of course, no RTS is ever perfect the first time it is released.    Multiple iterations of patches that address glitches and imbalances must be released before a game can “get it right”.    Starcraft, the national sport of Korea and considered to be the best RTS ever made, is still getting patched, and has been for years.  EA however, doesn’t exactly have the best track record for caring about player feedback and making out good games, instead opting crank out sequels from their cash cow franchises.    How unfortunate, especially since Red Alert 3 definitely has the potential to be a great competitive RTS.    The developers put a lot of thought into how to make it less about spam and more about tactics and strategy.    So only time will tell if EA wants to devote the time to make it good.    As it currently stands however, I prefer Tiberium Wars and Kanes Wrath to Red Alert 3 in terms of sheer entertainment value.