Genre	Real time strategy
System	P 133
Year	1996
Developer

C&C and its first sequel, Red Alert, held the crown as kings of the RTS genre for some time. The original, itself a development of another Westwood game, Dune 2, was the first RTS to hit the big time and since then we haven’t looked back, with C&C clones, some good, some bad, a very few truly excellent coming off the stocks almost weekly. For my money Red Alert was the best of the stable, even if it was no more than C&C in SVGA.

HISTORY

C&C came out in 1994, though I didn’t pick it up until the following year. The press raged about it and the then limited online community went for it in a big way. The missions for GDI (the goodies) and NOD were fairly different from each other, but became a bit samey towards the end, with virtually all of them simply requiring you to annihilate the other side. The last GDI level, however, was a monster if you didn’t pick the right place for a base. Red Alert appeared a couple of years later and was indeed much like the original, but with better graphics and a wider range of units. Both offerings had their add-on packs which were of variable quality. The third instalment appeared almost three years later than originally promised and was a massive disappointment, taking the genre precisely nowhere and simply milking the franchise. Possibly to death.

THE GAME

Sometime in the 1950’s, Albert Einstein builds a time machine and travels back to ‘20s Berlin, where he pops a cap in our old chum Adolf Hitler. All well and good, you might say, except that without Nazi Germany to keep the bugger in his box, Joe Stalin is free to attempt world domination, which he is doing at game start. You play either as the Soviets or as the Allies and, as in the first game, are given missions via a video briefing from your boss, either Stalin or a German general (with an atrocious accent).

Going to the battle screen, you are usually presented with an initial force of troops, including a mobile construction yard. This you convert into a construction base, which in turn can churn out some basic buildings, including power plants. As you build, more structures and units become available, though the more sophisticated ones don’t come into play until later levels. To pay for all this, you have to collect ore (as opposed to tiberium in the first game) and take it back to a processing plant. Most levels have you doing this for a little while before the action hots up, but in some cases you are in a fight from very early on. There is some welcome variety however, with several levels having time limits, either within which you must succeed (e.g. clear the way for a convoy) or for which you must survive. In general though, you build your base, including defences (such as turrets, pill boxes, AA guns and lightning towers), amass your forces, (ground, air and naval) and then go and pound the enemy. To achieve this you have such units as plain infantry, grenadiers, rocket troops (also useful against aircraft), several different types of tanks, APCs, scout vehicles and both fixed and rotary winged aircraft. Exotics such as spies, thieves and commandos also come into it for certain missions, and you can also aim for nuclear weapons, though the effect of these is more than somewhat disappointing.

At game start, only the land within sight of your units is visible. There isn’t a lot to say about the terrain. Trees, plains, rivers, sea and so forth, but it is flatter than a witch’s tit, with just the occasional, impassable, range of hills to break things up. To maintain coverage of the land you have reconnoitred, you have to build radar domes. Playing as the Soviets, wider intelligence is gained via spy planes, once you have built an airfield, while the Allies have a GPS satellite that can be launched to give a view of the entire battlefield.

Selecting and controlling units is simple, though you have to be pretty quick on the keyboard/mouse when the battle is raging. If there is a real complaint, it is about the AI of the units, both friendly and enemy. You really can’t trust your troops to do the sensible thing in all circumstances, so the game becomes less strategic than tactical, but once you’ve made allowances for that, you can pretty much take full control of your own destiny. What was disappointing for this sequel, was that few if any of the niggles from the original were addressed. No building queues, no way points, no multiple windows, the list goes on and on.

LEVEL DESIGN

There are something like 15 levels for each of the sides. Within each selection there are some very good levels and some merely ordinary. None were too difficult, provided you performed the basics adequately, but it was all too easy to get into a stalemate, especially later on and with ore fast disappearing, risks had to be taken, often resulting in failure. On a couple of occasions, the missions were in two parts, with the second half being inside enemy HQ, but these sections were fairly uninspiring.

THE SEQUEL’S SEQUEL

Three years later than promised came Tiberian Sun, which took us back to the original set-up, but some decades later. Never mind the story, which has the boss of the bad guys getting back into business, the game itself added no more to the genre than did Red Alert. Some fancy coloured lighting, building queues and waypoints (though both were pretty mediocre in execution), some new units and slick FMV sequences were all that Westwood could come up with. As a game in its own right, it isn’t bad, but after three years in development? Bollocks! Many of us poor suckers went out and bought the thing, but we won’t be making the same mistake with Red Alert 2 when it comes out in a few months. We’ll wait until the shouting has stopped and then have a look at what the magazines and chat fora are saying and then decide.

SUMMARY

Red Alert was probably RTS’s finest moment. It did just enough more than its illustrious predecessor to justify its production and for a time was untouched at the summit of the RTS hill. An excellent multiplayer game (though I do tend to lose to James rather too regularly for my liking) and fun even in the skirmish mode against the computer, it still gets regular outings on all three computers. If you don’t have this in your collection, go out and get it!