Brutal Gamer

Lookin’ Back #6 – Command & Conquer : Red Alert

By Mike - June 14, 2009 - 10:30 UTC - 1 Comment

Brutal Gamer’s weekly retro feature is here, this time with added Real Time Strategy goodness.

Hello, and welcome to another instalment of Lookin’ Back.  As a big fan of Real Time Strategy games, I’ve decided to go for probably my favourite RTS ever.  I think it’s safe to say that most people have heard of the Command & Conquer series that was initially created by Westwood Studios, who also made the Dune games.

In this edition, I’m going to talk about the second game in the long running Command & Conquer franchise, the original Red Alert.  It takes place in an alternative history of World War II, in which Albert Einstein developed a device that would enable time travel.  He went back in time to eliminate Hitler and prevent World War II from happening.  However, all this does is change the sides, as the Soviet empire tries to conquer Europe and the Allies, in this reality including Germany, are trying to prevent it.

So, you could play the campaign as either the Allies or the Soviets.  As would become a staple of the Command & Conquer series, each mission was introduced by a video where various high ups in the respective sides would address you and inform you of your mission.  What was weird for me, and couple of mates, is that the actor who portrayed Stalin made him come across as weirdly likeable, maybe due to the fact he was quite soft spoken and smoked a pipe.

The game included a great control scheme.  All the things that are taken for granted in RTS games these days, like building queues, unit grouping and so on, can pretty much be traced back to this game.

This was one of the first (if not THE first) RTS games to have online play with it.  I didn’t like playing as the Allies in multiplayer, unless the map had a lot of water, because those Allied ships could cause a hell of a lot of damage from a long distance.  The Soviets had much better ground and air units in my opinion, and more effective defence in the form of the legendary Tesla Coils, although, unlike Allied defence structures, Tesla Coils needed a LOT of power in order to work.

Also, like the first Command & Conquer game, Red Alert had an awesome sountrack, possibly one of my favourite game soundtracks ever.  And it was just a general joy to play.  I still sometimes break out my Command & Conquer First Decade disc and play a bit of it every now and then.

It is now traditional for Command & Conquer games to get an expansion.  Red Alert went one better and had 2 of them.  The first one was Counterstrike, which basically just added a new set of missions to the game, and I was mostly disappointed with, except for one thing.  If you held the shift button and left clicked the speaker at the top of the screen, you could access a secret extra campaign in which you led a squad which combined Allied and Soviet forces against an army of giant ants.  I kid you not.  This actually made up for the disappointment for me.  I mean, driving an army of tanks against an enormous ant?  What’s not to like?

The second expansion, released in the same year, was ‘Aftermath’.  This was more satisfying in that, not only did you get new missions, but also new units.  These made me a bit more inclined to choose the Allies for the Chronotank.  This unit was a tank with the same abilities as the Chronosphere, in that you could teleport to another area of the battlefield.  Good for jumping in behind enemy lines when they don’t expect it.  I got caught out by them quite a lot, too.

If you are an RTS fan, or you occasionally dabble in strategy, and you haven’t played the original Red Alert, you really owe it to yourself to play it.  Especially seeing as you can get it for free legally now.  It is, in my opinion, the greatest RTS game ever made.  And before I get any e-mails or comments, yes that does include Total Annihilation.  That game is excellent as well, but Red Alert is just a little bit more fun to play in my opinion.

Related posts:

1. EA Confirms Command & Conquer 4 For 2010 The Tiberium storyline will come to a conclusion with Command...
2. Command & Conquer 4 Gets Named The final chapter in the Tiberium storyline gets a subtitle....
3. Command & Conquer 4 Beta opens to public today Time to fight in the Tiberian Twilight EA have annouced,...
4. Command & Conquer set in Manchester? I hope it didn’t want to keep it’s hubcaps? Seems...
5. New Command & Conquer 4 screens Check out how this latests shots are looking New shots...