Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 Beta Hands-on

Aug 15, 2008

The Red Alert universe is not exactly what you'd call a "serious" place. It's practically a comedy version of a classic "alternate universe" scenario in which a time-travel experiment gone horribly awry has altered 20th Century history rather dramatically. When Albert Einstein travels back in time to kill Adolf Hitler, the lack of a Nazi Germany resulted in the Allies and the Soviets becoming the principle antagonists of World War II. An Allied victory results in many years of a "Cold War" that goes hot in the 1990s when a mind-controlled Soviet Premiere launches an assault on the United States led by bomb-dropping zeppelins and giant squid.

In Red Alert 3, the Soviet Union is on the verge of defeat and tries a last time-travel experiment to eliminate Einstein himself from the timeline. The result is a new history with the USSR resurgent against a weakened Alliance. New history means new and even more bizarre units as Russia's fighting bears and giant tanks face off against the Alliance's military-trained dolphins and time-traveling commandos. There's also a new opponent for Russia to deal with, Japan's Empire of the Rising Sun with its transforming robots and deadly psychic schoolgirls.

Fortunately for strategy game fans, EALA, the EA internal development studio now responsible for the Command & Conquer franchise, takes the game's strategic model much more seriously than its unit design. Red Alert 3, like its sister product, Command & Conquer 3, is going for a slick implementation of a simple muscular push-and-pull strategic model slathered over with buckets of personality and endearing charm. As Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 entered its beta phase, we decided to get our hands dirty to gauge whether RA3 was shaping up as a proud standard-bearer for this old-school RTS tradition.

Eagle in Flight

The Red Alert 3 beta is multiplayer-only and for balance purposes contains all three sides. This, of course, meant that we were finally able to get our hands on the "new" Allies, the only side that EA had yet to reveal. That made the Allies our first stop on our grand tour of Red Alert 3. What we found was interesting. The Allies have been hit hard by the change in the time line, resulting in a number of dramatic differences when compared to what C&C fans would be familiar with from Red Alert 2. The lack of Einstein's genius means that that while time travel and light-using prism technology does exist, it's much more primitive than before, and neither are a major component of the Allies' strategic doctrine.

While they have the best air force in the game, air power alone won't bring them victory. To that end, the Allies in Red Alert 3 pin their hopes for victory on a doctrine of preemption and versatility. Almost every unit in the game has both a primary and secondary ability. In the Allies' case, most of their secondary abilities are preemptive -- shutting down the enemy and keeping them from shooting back.

Hydrofoils, for example, are anti-aircraft boats that shoot a "weapon jammer" beam that keeps aircraft from firing. During our games, this became a key ability as it kept enemy aircraft from hitting our Assault Destroyers that were taking out a Soviet ore refinery. The huge and hideously expensive Aircraft Carrier comes complete with a devastating squad of small planes but its secondary ability (a "Blackout Missile" that shuts down all nearby electrical activity) proved far more important as an opening salvo for a land-bound invasion force.

Ground-bound forces have similar "shut down" abilities. While we were at first reticent to bring fragile Attack Dogs on offensive operations, their "Amplified Bark" which stuns enemy infantry made them more than useful, and they became a key combination with Allied Peacekeepers. Peacekeepers have a devastating shotgun blast at close range but tend to go down like wheat against longer-range opponents. A few Amplified Barks ended up being all we needed to get the Peacekeepers to the place where they could do the most good -- and the most damage.

The other prong of the Allies' strategic doctrine is versatility. There are certain pieces of Alliance equipment that actually change their strategic profile based on which soldier is manning it. Basic multigunner turrets, for example, become a local repair station when garrisoned by an engineer, while rocket-toting Javelin troopers turn them into anti-vehicle emplacements. The Alliance armored personnel carrier provides similar benefits on a mobile platform.

In a very real way, the ability is reminiscent of the Thrallmaster unit in EA's Rise of the Witch-King expansion for Battle for Middle-earth II -- and therein lies the danger. The Thrallmaster units in that game were badly overpowered when the game was released. While the mechanics of the changing weapons platforms aren't exactly the same, it's very possible that a player with sufficient micromanagement skill will be able to use it to run rampant over the battlefield.

There's really only one other qualm we had with the Allies and it had nothing to do with their strategic construction. It's that the Alliance simply isn't as aesthetically wacky as either the Soviets or the Empire. Of the three sides, it's the Allies that come closest to being a "normal" army. That's not to say they don't have their touches, of course. The Top Secret Time Bomb (a 10-second bomb that can drop anywhere the player has line-of-sight) is dropped onto the battlefield with an aiming sight that looks like a smiley face. When compared to the parachuting bears and transforming mecha they're facing, though, the Allies come off as rather dull by comparison.

Bear On the March

The other two forces continue to progress along their already-previewed strategic tracks. The Soviet Union is a brute-force army in contrast to the subtlety and maneuverability of its opponents. Finally getting a chance to play with the full red Army gave us a chance to appreciate the strategic elegance underneath. Unlike their opponents, any single Soviet unit is more than a match for almost any other particular unit in the other armies. Go toe-to-toe with the Soviets in a war of attrition and be prepared to wind up as goulash in the treads of a Russian tank. Their weakness is that they have to be able to see you to kill you. Both the Allies and the Empire can use superior speed and maneuverability to avoid Soviet guns, and in the Allies' case, they can use their many shutdown abilities to turn Soviet hardware into immobile targets.

Of course, the Soviets themselves are well aware of their weaknesses and have more than a few tricks up their sleeves to ensure the hammer and sickle will fly across the globe. Most of them have to do with their advantage in economics. A good Russian player in Red Alert 3 is going to be swimming in wealth. The "Cash Bounty" protocol allows the player to designate an enemy unit that awards a cash prize when killed. "Mass Production" allows them to build units at a reduced cost. The Soviet Engineers can build bunkers that can be used by any player after the payment of a fee. Even the Commando helps to minimize costs by using her "Pilot Snipe" secondary ability that kills an enemy vehicle's driver and leaves it to be seized by Soviet infantry.

Playing as the Soviets is actually much more straightforward and easier than playing as either the Empire or the Allies. As such, they'll probably be a magnet for new players who can learn that the most important thing the Russians can do is just get into the fight and start shooting. Many of their Top Secret protocols such as Magnetic Singularity (which drags nearby vehicles to a single point), Toxic Corrosion and Orbital Drop are designed to deny ground control to the enemy and force them to move to where the Russians want them to go. Being where the Soviets expect you to be is almost always a bad idea.

The Dragon Wakes

Of the three sides, we spent the least amount of time with the Empire of the Rising Sun. That's not because they're not interesting. In fact, for sheer comedy, the Japanese Empire is easily the craziest and most fun to play around with. The "Tengu" vehicles which can transform from jet to 'mech walker mode quickly became favorites.

With all due respect to both Natasha and Tanya, we're also deeply in love with Yuriko, the Empire's floating psychic schoolgirl Commando unit. In terms of sheer insanity, one would be hard-pressed to pick another unit in Red Alert 3 that packs as much punch as Yuriko in both the strategic and aesthetic sense. Visually, Yuriko is about what would happen if Sailor Moon took a few tabs of LSD -- a floating Japanese schoolgirl with so much psychic power radiating from her it actually makes the air crackle with electrical discharge. Strategically, there's simply no better moment in the game than using Yuriko's telekinesis power to crush entire tanks.

The major reasons we stayed away from the Empire is that we had covered them recently at E3 and that their strategic bias doesn't fit particularly well with the way we enjoy playing an RTS. The Japanese in Red Alert 3 are all about stealth and maneuverability. As the only empire that doesn't require ground control to build structures, we found that one of the most effective strategies was to spread our base facilities out as far as we could and be prepared to pull up stakes and move out at a moment's notice.

This, along with some very precise and situation-specific secondary powers on our Empire units, made a side that's much more dependent on micromanagement than either of their counterparts. It's not hideously micro-intensive when compared to certain other games on the market (we were certainly able to get the hang of using them), but considering how simple the other sides are to use by comparison, Japan may end up drawing a smaller percentage of the eventual player base.

The Long Twilight Struggle

In the end, of course, the best and worst thing we could say about our time in the Red Alert 3 beta is that the game seems to be shaping up into a classic Command & Conquer title. The C&C franchise has always occupied a rather unique place in the RTS ecosystem. Unlike games that have deeper or more foresight-driven strategic models, C&C games are muscular push-and-pull contests where fast reactions to what your opponent is doing are as important as your own unit mix and logistical planning. Basically Red Alert 3 is as much about the "real-time" as it is about the "strategy." That's just fine with us. Give us a game that combines solid strategy, adrenaline-fueled mayhem and parachuting Communist wildlife and we're happy.

Red Alert 3 is due for release this October.

Check out what IGN had to say about the beta.

Want to get into the beta yourself? It's available for download on FilePlanet.