Command & Conquer: Red Alert

aka: C&C 2, C&C:RA, C&C:RA1, Command & Conquer: Alarmstufe Rot, Command & Conquer: Alerte Rouge, Command & Conquer: Teil 2 - Alarmstufe Rot
Moby ID: 485
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Description official descriptions

What if Hitler never existed? Einstein pondered the question and created a time-machine to eliminate Hitler as a young man, thus preventing World War II as history remembers it. However, Einstein stopped one evil only to create another - because Stalin's Soviet Union is now poised to conquer Europe... and Allies must stop them!

Command & Conquer: Red Alert can be considered a prequel to Command & Conquer. Like its predecessor, it is a real-time strategy with an isometric semi-top-down perspective using 2D sprite graphics engine. The player takes control of either the Allies or the Soviets, as he battles for destiny of the planet. Gameplay features are similar to those of the previous game, including building a base with some defenses, massing units, harvesting resources, etc. The game has a variety of environments in its missions, adding some indoor missions that use only infantry units.

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  • 커맨드 앤 컨커: 적색경보 - Korean spelling

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Credits (DOS version)

93 People (90 developers, 3 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 88% (based on 44 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.9 out of 5 (based on 258 ratings with 16 reviews)

The Cold War gets a whole lot hotter!

The Good
After plunging through the PSX version of the first Command & Conquer (which I'll from now on refer to as Tiberian Dawn), it took quite a few years before I laid my hands on the later games in the series. It was only after buying the First Decade compilation that I eventually took the opportunity to play through the rest of the C&C series, starting with Red Alert.

While Tiberian Dawn took place in a realistic modern day setting, Red Alert takes on the battlegrounds of alternative history. It starts off with Albert Einstein (yes, THE Albert Einstein) using a self-made time machine to transport himself back in time to eliminate Adolf Hitler before his rise to power as leader of Nazi Germany. And Einstein does so not by shooting or stabbing him, but by the mere power of a handshake! Yeah, somehow Hitler disappears from direct physical contact with a guy from the future. Makes no sense, but hey, this is Red Alert, the game series that would feature mind controlled squids and psychotic Japanese school girls in its sequels, so just throw all sense of logic and real life physics out of the window right now!

But things didn't exactly go the way Einstein thought they would, as now the Soviet Union led by Joseph Stalin himself has free reign to commence their own plans for world domination! In a desperate attempt to stop the Commies' march, the Western nations (including Germany) join forces and become the Allies and so a devastating conflict begins for control over Europe.

The gameplay of Red Alert is very similar to its predecessor's. Once again, it's a Real Time Strategy game (RTS) wherein base building, unit training, resource gathering, attack and defense all have to be taken care of simultaneously. There's little time to think things over, as your enemy may be sending an army of tanks your way while you're casually building a few more ore refineries or silos. It is very important to prepare yourself for any possible situation. Base and unit building remains the same, click on the icon representing the unit or structure you want to have built and watch as the icon slowly starts to light up. Once it's fully lit, your unit will appear on screen or your structure can be deployed next to another of your buildings. Just make sure to have enough power plants built as some structures require quite a lot of energy to operate. You don't want your defenses to stop functioning just when you need them the most!

Just as in Tiberian Dawn, you have two playable factions each with their own unique set of units, structures and storyline consisting of about 15 missions each. Both these storylines will eventually lead to your chosen faction standing tall over the dead and broken bodies of the other side. Once again, the game uses live-action cut scenes to tell its story and they are significantly better than Tiberian Dawn's mainly because they now have a true Hollywood movie feel to them. In the previous game, it was just one person briefing you about your next mission, but in Red Alert, there's a lot more going on than just plain mission briefings. Some memorable scenes include Tanya's escape from the Soviet prison camp during the Allied campaign and Gradenko's death at the hands of Nadia in the Soviet campaign by drinking her excellent, self-made (and poisoned) tea. In other words, the cutscenes are a lot more action packed, engaging and therefore more fun to watch.

But story isn't the only thing that Westwood improved to the C&C formula. The gameplay is also significantly faster in pace. Building structures, training units and gathering resources goes quicker, allowing you more time to spend on the fun stuff, that is blowing your foes to kingdom come! Not only is the game more exciting thanks to its faster gameplay, but there's also a ton of new stuff added to the game including naval and aerial combat. Both sides have also received better balancing and overall they feel completely different from one another.

When you play as the Allies, you have access to fast moving, rapid-firing lightweight tanks, naval cruisers and you can steal intelligence or money using spies and thieves respectively. The Allies therefore specialize in meticulous planning and unit efficiency. The Soviets, on the other hand, use big and powerful assault tanks, jet fighter planes and submarines. They emphasize brutality and land-based attacks combined with the best air force units in the game. The Soviets' heavy emphasis on tanks can be effectively countered using Allied bazooka troops and landmines while the Allied naval prowess can be kept at bay using Soviet submarines. And while the Soviets have fast and powerful aircraft, the Allies possess excellent anti-air defenses. In other words, there is a suitable countermeasure for every unit or situation in the game.

The alternative history setting is used to full extent here, as new, weird sci-fi technology becomes highly prevalent in this game. The Allies, for instance, have access to the Chronosphere, which basically allows their units to teleport across the entire game map. The Soviets can use the Iron Curtain force field, which makes units or structures completely invulnerable for a short period of time. The Soviets also have Tesla coils, probably the coolest base defense weapon ever created. These are electric poles which zap every enemy stupid enough to come close enough!

The game's soundtrack is once again made by Frank Klepacki and he easily outdoes his already great Tiberian Dawn musical score with this iteration. The soundtrack is once again a mix of heavy metal with electronic music and military styled orchestra. Some tracks are very upbeat while others are dark and sinister. This is also the first game to include the now famous Hell March theme, definitely one of the most iconic video game music tracks ever created! Sound effects are pretty good (although I prefer those from Tiberian Dawn). Particularly Tanya and the spy units are fun to listen to. Tanya, like her predecessor the Commando, likes to spit out one liners for every kill she makes or building she blows up. She loves to laugh out loud or shout "let's rock" or "ka-ching!" The spy has a awesome cliché British accent and wears a tuxedo like James Bond. For king and country indeed!

The Bad
The game's difficulty is pretty cheap. You have three difficulty levels but they only change the number of hit points your units have compared to your enemy's. It doesn't change the enemies strategy at all, so expect the AI to attack you as ferociously on easy as they will do on hard, they will only go down easier.

The game's super weapons (Chronosphere and Iron Curtain) are pretty much useless. They only allow you to use it on a single unit at the time and in the case of the Chronosphere, the teleported unit will eventually return to its original location.

Unfortunately, the Soviets do not have a unique hero unit. I really wished they had a fun counterpart for the Allies' Tanya. Even a recolored and renamed Tanya unit would have been enough for me. Just imagine playing a few Soviet missions controlling a Soviet girl named Natasha and have her blow up Allied tanks using a portable Tesla coil or something like that.

The Bottom Line
One of the finest RTS games ever made. Red Alert takes everything from its predecessor, improves on the stuff that wasn't that great and jacks the good stuff up on steroids! If you liked Tiberian Dawn, than I cannot help but oblige you to check this game out. And like Tiberian Dawn, the game has been made freeware and it can easily be optimized for modern systems and widescreen resolutions. So go download this game and experience how cool alternative history can be!

DOS · by Stijn Daneels (79) · 2015

Addictive enough to complete and anticipate sequels

The Good
The sound - the tunes are nice, but so are the unit sound effects (particularly Tanya ("Ka-ching!!")).

The campaign - I was introduced to this game by way of "RA:Aftermath", which my brother and his friends liked to play in skirmish mode. One of those maps kept me going for several hours non-stop. But after enough of them, it became boring because they were basically all the same - once I figured out how to beat the computer, there was no challenge left (and the games became much shorter). When I acquired the original "RA" as part of the "Worldwide Warfare" pack, I decided to play the Allied campaign first. While there were only 14 missions, some were indoors, some had new units previously unavailable, and all in all there was enough variation and purpose to keep me going.

The cut scenes - the briefings (typically live actors) and opening/closing scenes (typically computer animation) for each mission are very well done. Much better graphics than the actual in-game stuff, actually (and which you never see at all in the skirmish games). There is also much more of it compared to other RTS games such as "Warcraft II", giving a better immersive feeling than that game.

The end game - the final Allied mission wasn't the pushover that I've encountered in other endgames. Just getting started was a challenge. And the AI was pretty aggressive about attacking my base (which I didn't really appreciate at the time!).

The Bad
The graphics - specifically the in-game (mission) graphics. Structures and landscapes are actually not bad, but most mobile units are clunky-looking. Human units in particular are small and hard to select out of a group.

The useless units - sandbags, walls, light tanks: what can they do that's worth spending money on? Chronosphere: the final mission introduces this expensive structure, but what is it good for? Sure, I can move a single unit far behind enemy lines, but not one powerful enough to do any real damage before it's destroyed (Tanya, who can blow up buildings, can't be moved this way).

The single resource - dull

The "kill everything" requirement - most outdoor missions are over long before this, basically when the AI can no longer fight back (it can no longer produce new units because you've destroyed all of some resource it needs (I like to destroy the construction yard myself, cutting off its technology tree at the root)). I use air power to reach that point, then "tank rush" just to get it over with. But it's boring (particularly if that last unit is a submerged Soviet submarine).

The air-power imbalance - it's probably not quite right to say I don't like this, because I exploited it often to win the game. Actually, I've used it to win "RA:Aftermath" skirmishes playing the Soviet side. It's probably best to say that the AI doesn't defend well against air power, mainly by not massing its available defenses well enough to beat an "air rush" attack, even though it is possible to do so for either side.

The Bottom Line
Well worth playing, but the single-player modes have a limited lifetime appeal due to increasing familiarity with the AI and its weaknesses. Perhaps the multiplayer modes are the long-term life of this game.

Windows · by anton treuenfels (34) · 2002

HEY! What's with all the bad reviews here? This game is a masterpiece

The Good
Command & Conquer is the most well known RTS franchise alongside Starcraft. The two franchises have similar gameplay, as both were heavily influenced by Westwood's Dune II. Red Alert came out two years before Starcraft did, and the main difference is that while Starcraft has a heavy emphasis on rushing, Red Alert is more focused on control over territory and resources. Both games however deliver very fast paced gameplay and intense fights. So I'm really not sure why many people here dislike this game, it is one of the most important RTS games to date, and is still a lot of fun to play today.

Starting off in 1946, at the Trinity site in New Mexico, the opening to Red Alert shows Albert Einstein as he is preparing to travel backwards through space and time. After his experimental "Chronosphere" device is activated, he finds himself in Landsberg, Germany, in the year 1924, where he meets a young Adolf Hitler just after the latter's release from Landsberg Prison. Following a brief conversation between the two, Einstein shakes Hitler's hand, and this somehow eliminates Hitler's existence from time and returns Einstein to his point of origin.

With the threat of Nazi Germany having been successfully removed from history, the Soviet Union began to grow increasingly powerful under the rule of Joseph Stalin. Had Adolf Hitler risen to power, Nazi Germany would have emerged as a force standing in the way of Stalin's own ambitions of conquest. Instead, left unweakened, the USSR proceeds by seizing lands from China and then begins invading Eastern Europe, in order to achieve Joseph Stalin's vision of a Soviet Union stretching across the entire Eurasian landmass. In response, the nations of Europe form into the Alliance, and start a grim and desperate guerrilla war against the invading Soviet army. Over the course of the game's story, the Allies and Soviets fight out a devastating conflict for control over the European mainland, in what has become an alternate World War II.

Most of the story is told through well executed cutscenes for both sides, which explain the story and the characters after each mission you play.

The gameplay of the game is very simple, yet takes a lot of time to master. The basic premise of a normal match is that you have a starting unit called "MCV", which stands for Mobile Construction Vehicle. You can deploy this unit at the desired location and it turns into the Construction Yard, which is the heart of a base: it allows for construction of other structures that in turn unlock other parts of the tech tree and allow for construction of more advanced structures and units. There's a wide variety of construction and unit types: the buildings you'll have to construct more often are called Power Plants: they serve to maintain a good power level of your base. Having a good power level is very important because having low power has many negative effects: Units and Buildings take a longer time to build and some structures (such as the radar and defenses) will not work at all. This gives an important point for the game as you may want to take out the enemy's power plants before taking out the defenses themselves, as this will power them down and allow for an easier invasion. Another vital structure is the Refinery: once you construct one, it automatically comes with a Harvester that collects ore and gems (which are more valuable) in the battlefield. They then return to the base with the resources, and they do all of this automatically. You can construct more refineries and harvesters and this makes collecting resources faster, however these structures are also a key target as their destruction will cripple a player's economy, so it is important to keep an eye on them.

Then there's various unit production structures like barracks, war factories, airfields and naval yards, that can produce a variety of ground, naval or air units. A good thing about this game is that it follows a kind of rock-paper-scissor-type of gameplay: Each type of unit is strong and weak to a different type of unit or structure: for example tank cannons and rockets are not really effective against infantry, but machineguns and artilleries can take out infantry very quickly. At the same time, machineguns are generally ineffective against buildings and tanks but are effective against light vehicles and infantry, and missile infantry is strong against tanks but not so much against actual infantry, and so on. This creates various situations that weren't present in Warcraft II, in which you always need to have the right unit at the right time in order to win a battle, as usually there are ways to counter most attacks if a player is well prepared.

The enemy can be attacked in various ways: By air, sea or land, you can steal the enemy's money using thieves, infiltrate enemy structures using spies and even capture enemy buildings and use them as your own thanks to the engineers, which are very versatile but vulnerable units.

The campaign has various missions and you can play as either the allies or the soviets. What's good is that the campaign offer various types of missions, like missions in which you get to command only a bunch of units and need to sabotage a base, and other types of missions in which you usually are at a disadvantage compared to your enemy and must find a way to turn the tide of the battle at your advantage. Each mission is different enough than the previous to make the campaigns for both sides very fun to play.

And I'll tell you straight up... I really don't want to sound offensive, but whoever thinks there's no strategy or thinking involved in this game either has not played the game at all, or is a complete idiot. There's a lot of management and strategy going on in this game: you have to use the right units at the right time, come up with good battle plants, explore the area and find out the enemy's weak spot: I've played enough of this game online to tell you that there's as much strategy here as one could possibly ask for. Sure, it is not as realistic or nitpicky as many of the more complex RTS games, but you know what? Those complex "RTS" games aren't RTS at all. They are slow and they are boring, there is no action whatsoever, they aren't real RTS games, they are management games, while Red Alert is essentially the thinking man's action game. So if you don't like action games, you most likely won't like this game.

The graphics are pretty decent, if a bit low-res but for 1996 standards they do the job well. The sounds and music are also very effective, and the soundtrack is VERY good.

One feature new to this game is Skirmish, which allows you to play against the AI in various maps. This is a very good feature that was not present in Tiberian Dawn, and essentially allows you to play a balanced, "normal" match as opposed to just the campaign maps. Since the game also has online play, it can offer hours and hours of fun if you play with friends or even competitively.

The Bad
It is true that this game is kind of like a graphical swap of Tiberian Dawn, as it uses many of the terrain tiles and even some of the units look the same. However, it is different enough to feel like a completely different game.

This game has just two major flaws:

Sometimes, the units may not behave the way you expect them to do. If for example you're ordering a large group of tanks to cross a bridge due to the fact the bridge is occupied by the tanks that first arrive, the other ones often decide to pick alternative routes to the location, and these routes are often unexplored and may either be very distant from your target or may have hidden enemy units or turrets that may destroy your tanks. Also, on few occasions units won't attack if you press the attack button too many times on a single unit, but this is easily fixed by doing it just once or twice. Fortunately, these situations do not happen too often.

The other problem is the lack of a queue system, but back in the day, no RTS games had it as far as I know. (in fact, Warcraft 2 didn't have it either). It isn't very bad but it would have been a welcome addition. Fortunately, later RTS games had it.

The balance of the game could have used some more work: for example the allied Artillery is almost completely worthless. What's good, however, is that it is very easy to edit the game's configurations with just notepad, and with the 3.03 patch you can play online games with your friends with edited units, so you can easily fix by yourself the few balance flaws of the game.

The Bottom Line
This is perhaps the most important and influential RTS game ever alongside Dune II. Most of its flaws are purely technical and are due to the fact this is one of the earliest RTS games, and thus these things are to be expected. If you're willing to forgive them, this is one of the most fun games you'll ever play, and is still lightyears ahead of most RTS games released after it.

Those who gave bad reviews on this game need to keep one thing in mind: when this game was released, the only real alternative to it was Warcraft II. And let me tell you one thing, as much as I love Warcraft II, this game is A LOT more varied than Warcraft II, which is basically a rushing simulator. This game offers so much more, and even if it has some balance issues, it's nothing that can't be overlooked if you're just looking for fun. Therefore I suggest readers ignore the nitpicky reviews and only focus on the fun factor of a videogame.

Westwood has almost created a whole genre with this game and its predecessor, Tiberian Dawn. Calling this game bad is an insult to the entire RTS genre. Red Alert did it first, and did it better than most games that came after it. Deal with it.

Windows · by CKeen The Great (160) · 2011

[ View all 16 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Anyone know whether there was multiplayer in PSX version? And Wan Dec 14, 2016

Trivia

1001 Video Games

Command & Conquer: Red Alert appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Freeware release

To celebrate 13 years of Command & Conquer and to promote the then-upcoming release of Red Alert 3, the game was made available for free on 31 August 2008. The link is available in the related web sites section.

German version

The German version removes Hitler from the intro and replaces all the soldiers with cyborgs.

Online servers

The game's online servers were migrated from the official Westwood Online infrastructure to the community-run XWIS (XCC WOL IRC Server), under approval and sponsorship from EA's German office on 20 October 2005. The Westwood Online domains have acted as a redirect to XWIS services since then, requiring no additional steps from the user to access the servers short of registering an account.

Sales

In 1998, the PC version of the game won the Platinum Award from the German VUD (Verband der Unterhaltungssoftware Deutschland - Entertainment Software Association Germany) for selling more then 200,000 (but less then 500,000) units in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Awards

  • Computer Gaming World
    • May 1997 (Issue #154) – Strategy Game of the Year (Readers' Choice)
  • Electronic Gaming Monthly
    • March 1998 (Issue 104) - Strategy Game of the Year
    • March 1998 (Issue 104) - Strategy Game of the Year (Readers' Choice)
  • PC Gamer
    • April 2000 - -10 in the "All-Time Top 50 Games" poll
    • April 2005 - #17 in the "50 Best Games of All Time" list
  • Verband der Unterhaltungssoftware Deutschland
    • 1998 - Platinum Award (more details in the "Sails" section)

Information also contributed by Grant McLellan, Sciere and Xoleras

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Related Games

Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2
Released 2000 on Windows
Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3
Released 2008 on Windows, Xbox 360, 2009 on Macintosh
Command & Conquer: Red Alert - Retaliation
Released 1998 on PlayStation, 2008 on PSP, PlayStation 3
Command & Conquer: Red Alert - Counterstrike
Released 1997 on DOS, Windows
Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 - Commander's Challenge
Released 2009 on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, 2019 on Xbox One
Command & Conquer: Red Alert - The Aftermath
Released 1997 on DOS, Windows
Command & Conquer: Yuri's Revenge
Released 2001 on Windows

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by robotriot.

PSP, PlayStation 3 added by Charly2.0. PlayStation added by Kartanym.

Additional contributors: Cochonou, PCGamer77, Xantheous, Kasey Chang, Jeanne, paul cairey, Sciere, Alaka, Xoleras, Jang Eunsu, —-, Cantillon, Patrick Bregger, Plok, MrFlibble, FatherJack.

Game added November 28, 1999. Last modified March 19, 2024.