Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2

The Good
I won't hide it: I hate Command & Conquer. The lot of them. I don't understand how Westwood went from Dune 2 to this. It's just un-damn-believable.

You want to know what's good about RA2? I'll tell you - music. It's the only good thing about this stupid game. It does indeed rock.

The Bad
What DIDN'T I like? Everything!

First of all, the graphics are bland, uninteresting and certainly not worthy of a year-2000 game. 1997 at the latest. The animations are, for the most part, worse in quality than Starcraft (that did come out in 1997), and there's nothing about this game that suggests it was a few years in the making (which it was).

The artificial intelligence is artificial alright. Your units are impossibly stupid, and so is the computer. Your units will ignore your commands at times, ignore it when enemies shoot them or get into their firing range, plant their own (stupid) courses to get from point A to point B - often entering the range of enemy defenses, and behave not like seasoned troops but rather as though they were G.I. Joes toyed around with by 8 year olds.

The game engine is slow and buggy as hell.

The built in missions suck.

The game is incredibly unbalanced and basically revolves around superunits - seals/Tanyas taking out whole armies of tropps within seconds, three prism tanks can take out a building in two shots, Black Eagles can destroy any building in one assault, Soviet harvesters are just so impossibly tough to kill (and they shoot back - fiercly!) and everything reeks of GODDAMNIT, HOW COULD THEY HAVE POSSIBLY MISSED THIS IN THE BETA?!

The Bottom Line
The worst RTS I ever played, which is amazingly just as good if not better than the rest of the C&C series. In short, an utter piece of crap only worth playing to listen to the great music.

The Good
the graphics are preatty good most of the time, tho sometimes they suck. great music. voic acting for the units rocks sometimes, suck oher times. a good example for it is the great lybian truck vs. most of the lame soviets (if they were sampled from even semi russian people...) another example is the Desolator, he sound kewl, like a Warcraft2 deathknight - but isn't he supposed to be Iraqi???

The Bad
stupid plot. boring campaign. a few superunits can crush a base in seconds. snow levels look like crap. stupid unuseful expansive sea units. stupid ai - your units ignore it when they are being fired upon, plot their own stupid courses and enter enemy fire zones. a few dogs can kill dozens of gis and they just ignore them. units ignore your orders sometimes for no appearent reason - only to get themselves killed.

The Bottom Line
For some unknowen reason this game is fun. maybe it's alien influence. play it, curse the stupid ai and continue to play.

The Good
Unlike the original Red Alert, I was much more able to get into the campaign missions in Red Alert 2. Somehow they just seem to be structured much better. Plus, they take place in a lot of realistic locations. Even the cutscenes that precede each mission are much more believable and entertaining than average. As in any C&C game, Red Alert 2 features an excellent soundtrack, cool units, and there is now a whole slew of internet play modes that are quite a lot of fun. The updates to the game's interface are also much appreciated.

The Bad
There aren't really too many significant gameplay differences from the original Red Alert.

The Bottom Line
A simple, fun, and addictive, "just blow your enemies away" type of strategy game.