Game Review: Red Alert 3

This picture says it all.

The game is fun. I will allow it that, but only because the rest of this review will dismantle it, and I want to make clear that it is indeed moderately enjoyable to play. It is also moderately enjoyable to watch, but only to a certain extent.

Style

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When you first load the game, you are greeted by women. Women in the startup screen, women in the cinematics, women throughout the game. All of these women are attractive, and they are all scantily clad. The adviser that you are faced with for the soviet missions is dressed is what looks like light bondage gear. Some degree of sexuality is expected in video games, but RA3 takes it so far beyond any degree of normalcy that it makes the game immediately ridiculous. If a normal computer game is something like a SciFi novel, RA3 comes across right off the bat as something more akin to Maxim.

I am not sure how I feel about this rampant sexuality. I know that because of it, my wife would likely find the style juvenile and pathetic, even though she enjoys most of the RTS style games she's played. Heck, I find the style juvenile and pathetic, and I am supposed to be the target audience. I also understand that it was almost certainly engineered to be over-the-top in exactly this way, and while I do see the humor in it, it comes across as very forced, and the first Red Alert game achieved the effect with essentially zero budget.

The style for the rest of the game is disjointed and horrible, pretty obviously an afterthought. The entire menu system is formulated around a stylized version of soviet propaganda materials from the post WWII era. This could have been done well, but the way it turned out it was just flat and boring.

Gameplay

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The game is an RTS, through and through. For the company that (arguably) invented the genre, Westwood had been able to refine their skills through the first three iterations of the CnC franchise. Then they were bought by EA, and they released RA2. The game was a cartoon, and while fun, it was completely predictable. Westwood seemed to lose the progressiveness that had brought them the first RTS ever, and that hasn't changed for RA3.

The combat is interesting enough, complex and fast paced, requiring a lot of attention to large groups lest an entire army be lost to mismanagement. The economy of the game is centered around ore collection like in previous CnC games, but it is executed poorly, forcing the player to build a collection facility essentially directly on top of centralized ore 'nodes,' and still maintain collector units and separate buildings. I am definitely down with the concept of point-based resource collection, but the execution here is overcomplicated and unsuccessful. The graphics are top notch, as expected, but nothing awe-inspiring.

Overall the gameplay is acceptable, but nothing more, The sole shining light in the game is the inclusion of Co-op campaign modes. This is absolutely fantastic, and should be included in every RTS from here on out. Of course, it has been done in countless mods before this point, so it is definitely not new, but it is a welcome addition to the game. The inclusion of water as a integral and playable surface is welcome as well, but more of a gimmick than anything. It really only serves to flatten the battlefield and it doesn't alter tactics too much, since most units can traverse both mediums with no real trouble.

Overall

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The game is for me a failure because it is firmly lodged in the 'sequel' mentality. The style is clearly half-assed, and the gameplay is clearly a copy-paste from RA2. This game could have really made the CnC franchise stand out, but instead it ended up being nothing more than another EA cash cow. It is fun to play, but that is where it stops; there is nothing that stands out, nothing that would make this game anything other than one iteration in a series. EA understood what they needed to make a buck on this game, and once they put forth the minimum effort that is exactly where they stopped.

If you need proof of this, you need look no further than the DRM shipped with the game. Not only does the game come packaged with 'security' software, it is also nothing more than a rental with an install limit, subject wholly to EA's whim. I won't go too deeply into the maddening way that EA insists on punishing game owners, suffice to say that it is the primary reason why I will not buy the game (I played it on a friend's computer to write this, obviously).

So, next time they need to bring something to the table. With Spore's lackluster gameplay and now this, I will most definitely be trying any large EA game in a free capacity, with some pretty hefty criteria for success before I even consider buying. The game is purely adequate, nothing more. Perhaps worth 20 bucks, even less with the DRM.

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