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
Windows Specs
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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.

Spellings

  • 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)

Fool me once, shame on you…

The Good
Red Alert (RA) is an undeniably stylish game, just like its predecessor. I kinda like the alternate history approach the designers took in crafting the storyline. It’s still a little too B-movie sci-fi for my taste, but a step in the right direction, nonetheless. After all, you do get to kill Commies. “Better dead than Red!”

The graphics are significantly improved from C&C, at least in the Windows 95 version of RA. The units are still pretty small, and the overall look of the game isn’t as impressive as that of Warcraft 1 & 2, but it was an improvement. The enemy AI is not brilliant by any means, but it’s persistent, and it can throw you for a loop once in a while. Frankly, I’ve seen much worse. Westwood also included a solo skirmish mode this time around, which definitely adds to RA’s replay value. Why didn’t they think of that before?

I liked the slick packaging and the shiny, thorough instruction manual. They both fooled me into thinking RA was going to be a fun game to play.


The Bad
Let’s face it: Red Alert is still a C&C game, which means it’s a big, cheesy, buggy mess. Surely all of the critics who said RA was even better than Warcraft II were joking.

RA is at least as unbalanced as the original C&C, perhaps even more so. While I appreciate the thought behind making the two sides distinct, the game is spoiled by the fact that the Soviets clearly have the better units. The Allies are inferior in ground and air forces, and while they have the superior naval forces, that won’t do you much good unless you are playing on a water-based map. Whichever side you choose, the unit variety is strictly for appearance’s sake. For example, I can’t see why a Soviet player would produce anything but the heaviest tanks. And thus the infamous RTS “tank rush” phenomenon was born, I suppose.

Units continue to be woefully unresponsive to orders. Or else they just respond so stupidly as to be beyond belief. If there is an unnecessarily long and circuitous route for your units to take to get from Point A to Point B, you can rest assured that they will find it! It’s also still a challenge just to select your units and get the selection to stick for very long. Maps and missions continue to be too puzzle-like for an alleged “strategy” game. It’s the same hair-pullingly maddening design as before, just slightly upgraded, tweaked and repackaged as a brand new game. Why didn’t the professional reviewers mention any of this stuff when RA came out?

The Bottom Line
If you liked C&C, you’ll probably like Red Alert even more. If you’re like me, though, you won’t care for either one.

Windows · by PCGamer77 (3158) · 2013

The best of the franchise

The Good
Command & Conquer: Red Alert made some huge steps forward considering it only came about a year after the original Command & Conquer for DOS. The biggest thrill are now absolutely fantastic pre-rendered cutscenes that feel like watching a movie, u-boats, fighter jets, tanks, turrets, it's all there, and there's plenty of them to watch. Acting is now much more fun as there are more than just a single person looking right at you and giving you some mission briefing. It's absolutely fantastic how cheesy yet perfect the acting is, it is bad, it is funny, but the fact is it wouldn't be so great if it was any better. It is interesting to see how each of them is trying to use you to achieve their own goals, while plotting to overthrow each other (Soviet campaign movies are just plain priceless, they all kill each other in those FMVs sooner or later, until you end up with Kane, the only bad guy worth following ;)

The story is set in the past as Einstein found a way to travel through time and removed Hitler out of the way. With World War II never happening, Stalin somehow came to an idea to seize control over the globe. The game fits nicely so you can later claim that original C&C is its actual sequel. They totally ruined everything with appearance of RA2 afterwards which split the franchise into Red Alert and Command & Conquer and put a solid barrier between their timelines with very little connection whatsoever.

Missions are now stretching only across the Europe, and you are given a choice to play as Allied or Soviet commander, which will eventually lead you to rather satisfying though peculiar endings. Can't figure out why some people didn't like them, they're quite okay if I do say so myself. Again, Frank did masterful work with the music as it fitted the red storm idea up to the teeth, and is nothing short of perfection. Unlike many other games of a sort, C&C was well greeted for varying arsenal on both sides, not just giving you same unit with different looks. Red Alert makes the battle strategies even more diverse as the balance of power is more than cool. Playing as soviet commander you'll notice you absolutely have supremacy concerning tank vehicles which can crush even the top allied ones although less in numbers. On the other hand, allied tanks compensate their weakness with the speed. On the water, however, allies take all the pride as their navy is quite ferocious and their cruiser ships can devastate bases from screens afar. Opposing compensation lies with the subs, stealth and only able to destroy naval targets and shipyards. The air supremacy is on the side of Soviet forces, and now you can have airfields to host as many fighters as you can build, not just call the backup in a form of reinforcements from out of the screen.

Many new structures serve the purpose but are not always the same, although they could've made different looking factories, though. Turrets are different as allies tried to make those that can withstand soviet tanks, while soviet forces focused more on repelling light tanks and infantry crowds. And of course, there are secret technologies aiding both sides which usually become available on later levels, or right from the start if you feel like playing a skirmish or multiplayer game. Also, the biggest thrill is that Windows version has higher resolution thus showing more of the battlefield, fancy icons, and still running just swell, in other word, great.

The Bad
The whole idea of putting three difficulty levels in the game is quite ridicule if they only serve to lower your shield and firepower and increase that of the enemy. Real-time strategy is all about the strategy and the only element that should define difficulty should be computer's AI and how well is responses to your threat and tactics, cheating just isn't fun.

Sometimes computer can block itself with its own units. That is both good an bad, but it's a bug so it's bad. The good thing game-wise is that you can rest from the constant attacks, but once you determine to go un-block computer's units, you better come in huge numbers because the longer it stays blocked, the more units it will produce that will just wait in the base you'll have to conquer.

The Bottom Line
A fine RTS, no, probably the best RTS ever made, what later they ruined with Red Alert 2 is up to the association with now known EA Pacific, and bad usage of cinematics and wasted talent of some great actors included. Original Red Alert has none of that, acting is both great and fun, missions are interesting and progressive, soundtrack is catchy, and cinematics are breathtaking. In spite of being the predecessor of cheesy looking RA2, the original Red Alert still saved some sort of seriousness in its own self so it doesn't look like a parody but a well blend mixture of fun, entertainment, and presentation.

Windows · by MAT (240759) · 2012

One of the Best and Worst Games of All Time

The Good
This is one of the first RTS games to get very popular online. TEN and MPlayer (and a few others) were the place to play it online. Why is that big deal? Well, the older online RTS games were actually very good sandbox games! The player had many different options in the game that led to very interesting games. Modern RTS games emulate this, but are in fact very scripted.

CnC:RA also had one of the very first working gaming ladders where players could compete to gain rank. This is common place now, but this was a huge thing back then. In addition, there was a not a "professional gaming staff" running the ladder, it was all amateurs who were honestly trying to have an open ended tournament (unlike many ladders today).

The Bad
The single player game was an awful rail game. If you didn't build exactly the right units and move them onto exactly the right map location, the developers would force you to lose the game.

The cutscenes were "high tech" for the day, and since many other genres were really pushing them, RTS games picked them up as well. It didn't matter if they were extremely short and boring, you simply had to have them, because everyone else did!

And the multiplayer had one major drawback; tank rushes! Because of how the maps were setup, and the units were balanced, if you didn't build 100% tanks from the very beginning you were going to lose horribly in about 5 minutes. Very few of the maps were setup so you could turtle (and thus tech up), so every game was a low tech tank rush. This was a knee-jerk reaction to players complaining about other players building up walls of defenses in CnC1.

The Bottom Line
A smoother version of CnC that was still terrible in single player, but quite good for it's day in multiplayer. But it had one major black eye; it's map design and balancing led to most games degrading into tank rushes.

Windows · by Sean Johanson (13) · 2010

[ 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
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Command & Conquer: Red Alert - Retaliation
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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
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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.