“Wow, look, this ship is so cool!”
“That’s weird, I can’t build ships.”
“Well I guess it’s asymmetrical, so you can build one part of the army and I do the rest.”
“Hm. You’ll have to defend me then, so I can concentrate on cranking out tanks.”
“Sure thing. Although I’m being attacked too and … wait, is that a battle dolphin?”
Red Alert 3 is a real-time strategy game set in the long line of Command & Conquer games. As usual, we are following an alternate history that was made possible by time traveling shenanigans. This time, the three warring sides are the Soviets, the Allied forces, and the Empire of the Rising Sun (a sort of retro-robopunk version of Japan). The tone is incredibly silly and over-the-top, along with your standard tanks and soldiers there are also warbears, ninjas, a tank that can turn invisible, giant robot samurais, a vehicle that shoots infantry over long distances, etc.
The game follows a very classic linear RTS recipe. There are campaigns for the factions, each with nine levels. For most of the missions, you have a base you have to develop, so you harvest the resource you will use (ore), add buildings(generators, defense turrets, unit producing buildings), train units (infantry, tanks, air force, navy), and then when you did that for sufficient amount of time, you attack, obliterate the enemy, and you are on to the next mission. The units produced by the three factions are vastly different, and in general all sides have their relative strengths and weaknesses.
What makes this game special and outstanding is the fact that you can play the campaign in full co-op mode. Every mission is basically designed for two players, if you play solo, an A.I. will take over half of the troops. You both have your own units and buildings and economy, and work together to beat the enemy forces.
Disclaimer, I deeply love the original Red Alert from the glorious year of 1996, and can’t (and won’t) help comparing this game to it.
The Good
Let’s start with the big one, just the fact that you can play a RTS game’s campaign in co-op mode is great. I am not aware of many any other games like that, the only one that comes to mind is Dawn of War II. And I mean the story mode and the full campaign, because of course you can play scenario maps in most strategy games, but as far as I know, this is quite unique. (Please let me know if you are aware of any other!) A lot of the missions are asymmetrical too, so the two of you have to work on different aspects of the strategy. Red Alert did not have this function at all. RA3 wins.
Most of the missions are really challenging, and you can literally lose with a wrong mouse click. It’s all the more satisfying when you finally beat the enemy in the end. Red Alert was super challenging too. Draw.
The game has an incredibly campy style, most of the videos are live-action footage with some quite famous actors playing their parts in a ridiculously over the top manner. The men have enough personality for a room, they are usually maniacal power hungry sadists, and the women… well they have breasts. You either find the style mildly interesting, or really annoying, for me, it’s a plus point for originality. Although I would have preferred to see more cool actions in the cutscenes, rather than people talking in cheap costumes on cheap sets, but it has its charm. Red Alert also had a very unique style, but took itself more seriously, and managed to get some pretty dramatic moments in the story. Remember Tanya’s kidnapping? Well I do. I don’t remember anything that happened in Red Alert 3, I don’t even remember what the time travel was about. RA1 wins.
The Bad
First of all, I really hate the units in this game. They are way too gimmicky. If you want to make a completely silly game, fine, but then do that, also make it fun and relaxing to play. Moving up the Red Alert comparison in this paragraph, I am confident I can list all the original game’s units for both factions, and that’s because they made sense. They had machine gun soldiers and rocket launchers and tanks and troop carriers, so normal stuff. Both sides had well distinguishable units that could shoot close / far, do AoE / single damage, work well against armor / against infantry, possibly do stealth, against air / land, and some could move on the water. Here, you have a vehicle that can also turn into an umbrella and explode if someone touches it and is also a submarine and can shoot war bears on parachutes through great distances. (OK, minor exaggeration there, it’s actually two units combined. Still!) I found the Japanese faction especially annoying, they have like four different robots that can turn into other stuff like airplanes and tanks and ninjas but they look very similar and nothing indicates if they work against flying units or not (which was the main source of frustration for me). Oh, and most of your units also have a special attack that you can use once every X seconds. Keeping all of this in mind quickly gets annoying. RA1 wins.
The interface is also somehow foggy and not responsive. Especially on higher difficulties and later missions, I found it hard to locate my troops, or half my base was destroyed because I was looking elsewhere and I don’t think I got a signal, but would have expected my men standing a quarter a monitor away to do something about it. Red Alert also did not excel on the A.I. front, but that was 12 years before this game. OK, no excuses, draw.
Most of the missions are OK, but for some reason we still have these incredibly lame ones when you have one supersoldier and you are just walking through fields of enemy soldiers who insta-die as they look at you. There is no challenge or strategy involved. Another weak element of the design is that there are surprising twists in a lot of the maps. But if you know about them, because you already tried to beat the mission once, or just happened to save before, then they kinda lose their potency. For example, if the main mission is to conquer an enemy building, and once you do that, you unexpectedly also have to defend it for X amount of time against a sudden enemy counterattack, well the next time you do that mission, you will just build up a huge force around the building, and only then conquer it. Red Alert also had this flaw, so it’s a draw.
Oh, I also did not finish the game. There are 27 missions in this game, and after a half year hiatus, I started up again on mission 24, found it impossibly hard without remembering all the itsy bitsy details about the robot ninja submarine whatevers, so I took down the difficulty to Easy, figured it’s enough if I can just move my troops around correctly. And then mission 26 was so annoyingly hard that I had to stop, finally write this review, and delete the game. Now, I identify as a completionist, and have a hard time letting things go, especially if I’m close to the finish line. It had to be really annoying for me to rage quit. On the other hand, I beat Red Alert like five times. It’s that good. RA1 wins.
And finally, the main one. The observant reader might have noticed how I keep saying “I” did this and “I” did that instead of “we”. The official servers of the game are long gone, remember, this is more than a decade old now. (Should have started with that, right…?) There is some fan made software for old C&C games that lets you join each others’ games, and we did manage to make it work. In our old place. And then we played like half of the Soviet missions and then we moved and got a different router and then the Gods of the Network spoke against this game, and we did not bother figuring it out, so we could not actually play together since then. On the other hand, you can easily play Red Alert, because all you need is a LAN connection. RA1 wins.
The Co-Op
Well, first of all, I still can’t get over the fact that this game is co-op at all. Could be just me, but I find it wonderful.
The asymmetry in most of the missions brings a really interesting challenge and you need to co-operate very carefully. For example, one player might spawn on a water base, and be in charge of defending from the enemy’s naval attacks, while the other player builds up the invasion force. Or one of you can be in charge of a slow moving superweapon, and the other provides support. It’s great fun.
You obviously have to constantly rescue each other from the onslaught of the enemy forces (help, I’m attacked!), or plan the timing of an attack very carefully (help, I’m attacking!), you really succeed or fail together.
The Recommendation
Well, hear me out. I actually do recommend a game with a few caveats.
- First, you need to be tech-savvy in order to actually play together.
- Second, how shall I put it without being offensive… Well, I think this is one of those games that you will probably either like or dislike based on your gender. If you are a female and like this game, great, good for you, but based on my thorough research and representative collected data, the odds of that are low… OK, my editor colleague says that this is sexist. So the official statement is that this shameless game appeals so much to the hateful male fantasy that… it might as well have a “No Girls Allowed” sign on it I guess.
- And finally, you have to be OK with putting a lot of energy in learning the different units and special skills because you can’t win without a deep understanding of how everything works. (One might say RA3 is actually a gamer’s game. And you know what? One will, and one will also put in the hashtag.)
Info
| Release Year | 2008 |
| Genre | Real-Time Strategy |
| Difficulty | Extreme |
| Number of Players | 1 to 2 |
| Length | 25 hours |
Rating
| Overall | Mediocre |
| Story | Good |
| Co-Operation | Good |