Command & Conquer: Red Alert

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.

The Good
Now, I a writing this review after not playing the game for a while, I prefer Total Annihilation, so my review may seem strange, but I remember enjoying the simplicity of the game, and the variety of missions in campaign mode, the two sides had different units unlike Total Annihilation(TA) where the units on each side were copies of each other, but thats about it....

The Bad
... I really disliked the inevitable tank rush that would finish any game especially if using the soviets, also the exhaustable resources made the game, on low ore maps with lots of players a game of who can spend their money the most effectively, which is fine, but when one runs out of ore and sees their base getting battered it is VERY annoying, yes it adds another element to the game, but I feel a bad one. The AI on the both TA and red alert are bad, but at least on TA they know when they can't win on a attack and turn around to allow reinforcements to catch up, on both games if the AI is left alone then the bases grow to ridiculous sizes and on red alert become very hard to beat without the tank rush (Yes I did try using a mixture of units, the infantry got slaughtered and the planes killed two things before getting shot down). On TA a variety of units are required to overcome the defences of a established base.

The maps that come with the game aren't the greatest either but there is a map editor.

!!!!!!YOU CAN'T SAVE SKIRMISHES EITHER>HOW ANNOYING!!!!!!

The Bottom Line
Its good fun for a while, but I found that the game would be the same each time you played the skirmishes, which couldn't be saved so the amount of wasted time was extreme, on TA you can save skirmishes and the amount of units avaliable on addons and the internet is huge, you can even make your own units and AI. I don't think that Red Alert has stood the test of time like TA has, I advise people to buy TA I prefer it to Generals in terms of gameplay and variety.

The Good
It is somewhat enjoyable, I am a huge Real Time Strategy fan, that's probably what keeps me going, but then I have the great Windows version, so I hardly play it at all, sometimes I do, just for a quick laugh! :-)

The Bad
The graphics are very bad, there are too little options, cutscenes are slow and tough to hear, the animation isn't smooth, and even though many of these things were there in Dune and Dune 2, those games were somehow more enjoyable...

The Bottom Line
Downright Ugly (The DOS version). I certainly advise not buying this, buy the windows version instead!