Command & Conquer Red Alert

Price: 5.99

Original Release date:

Release date on PSN: November 12th, 2009

Story

Image via Wikipedia

This game starts off with a hypothetical than anyone who’s ever taken high school history has thought of. A time machine is built, and Einstein goes back in time and kills Hitler before he takes over Germany. Good right? Well in this scenario, instead of Hitler waging war on Europe, Stalin decides to use the power of the Soviet Union to invade!

This is an interesting concept to be sure, and Westwood studios (the developing studio) milks this for all it’s worth, I wouldn’t go out on a limb though and say the story is compelling. I played this when I was a kid and thought it was amazing, but now it’s just good for a laugh. The full motion videos are hilarious too, especially when watching the actor who’s playing Stalin has the Russian accent that is a little forced to say the least.

The really interesting thing on this game, like all Command & Conquer games, is the ability to play as both sides of the conflict, so the first disk is the Allied missions; the second disk holds the Soviet ones. This is a cool feature that pretty much doubles the play time of this game, which is really up to you.

Gameplay

This is a bit of a sore spot on this game actually, there’s a reason why real time strategy games never really did well on consoles, and it’s because of the lack of a mouse and keyboard. Playing this game on the regular playstation controller is a bit of a pain, though after a while it just becomes a petty annoyance and doesn’t mean the game is broken. You can lose yourself in the skirmish mode pretty easily, and not realize how many hours you’ve spent destroying bases. My brother can attest to this seeing as he spent hours on my playstation late at night re-living his childhood on this title. SO the gameplay is a bit off, but not a killer, you can still enjoy this game.

And tesla coils are awesome.

Image via Cnet.com

Graphics

Alright so this isn’t the best looking game, but it’s not supposed to be. The graphics are 2d drawings built to represent what they’re representing and then allow as many units as possible onto the screen at once. Red Alert does succeed in the way that everything represents everything well enough, but then again when you finish a mission and get a mission accomplished message across your screen you could be forgiven to think that this isn’t the NES. Some of the animations are nice though, the infantry, tanks and vehicles all move well, and are fun to see when your tank runs over a platoon of enemy soldiers giving a satisfying squish.

The music does pretty well though, with some hard pumping rock tracks that are simply awesome, and makes you feel like a badass because you just sent a squadron of planes to go destroy the enemies incoming attack force.

How it holds up

Now I must admit to being a little nostalgia driven on this title, to the point where I bought this thing the moment it was released. This is a great title for those of you who like tower defense games and RTS, but there are a few things I haven’t spoken of that are total deal breakers.

There is no save function

That’s right, when you beat a mission you have to write down a password to keep your place instead of having it saved. This is a huge mistake; I can’t believe they got away with this back in the day. I mean every other psone classic I’ve played has a save function, why not this? They lost a lot on my scale right there.

It runs incredibly slowly on the psp.

I’m not sure if it’s the emulator or not but the game shows considerable slow down on the psp. Mind you the controls on the psp aren’t as good as those on the regular controller for this title anyways but still it doesn’t really help the matter.

So you have a game that’s fun on skirmish but a campaign that is essentially unplayable on the bus because of the bad controls and the need for a notepad to keep your place. Not something I recommend, hardcore fans are the only ones welcome at this party.

6.5/10

(had there been a save function I probably would have scored it an 8/10)

Edit: Apparently you can download the original Red Alert for the PC from the EA website for free. That’s the version to grab.

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