Command and Conquer 3: Red Alert

After watching David Hasselhoff’s online endorsements for the new Command and Conquer game, I found myself feverish with excitement to give it a shot, despite my lack of experience with Real Time Strategy since the days of Starcraft long, long ago. I mean, the advertising campaign for this game was simply fantastic... and the wonders it purported to offer... laser-mounted dolphins, psionic Japanese schoolgirls, Russian attack bears... Jenny McCarthy, George Takai and Tim Curry? Here was a video game cast that looked like they were having a great time at work, and I wanted to be in on their tongue-in-cheek mutual ongoing joke. It’s too bad, alas, that after 15 hours of fairly bewildering game play, it is safe to say that the actors were the only ones having a lot of fun.

Plotting Points by Tan(x)
Video Game Reviews by a Very Busy Math Teacher

Game: Command and Conquer 3: Red Alert
Platform: Xbox 360
Played For: 15 hours

Command and Conquer Red Alert has the best packaging, and the best encapsulating devices, that have ever been used to disguise a poorly designed game play experience. The star-studded cast do a great job telling this crazy little tale of time travel, Cold War politics and campy B-movie silliness. The little moments, a nod or a wink, subtle reactions to unintended double entendres, it is here that the cast can really shine, elevating the nonsensical plot into something with which you want to participate. But beware, as Command & Conquer Red Alert typifies negative American stereotypes... loud and shiny and irreverent on the outside, but with little actual substance once you’ve begun to play the game. It is a game that is slowly unwrapped, but then quickly discarded and forgotten... all the enjoyment was in the expectation.

Like Communism, there are some great ideas here that are completely swamped by unrealistic goals and bad design. For example, a lot of thought went into how to successfully implement an RTS on a console without losing functionality. A lot of the work here is solid... intuitive menu wheels, keymapping on the D-pad, and so on. But despite a really good effort to make things easy and simple, the hour long tutorial sessions can’t hide the steep learning curve you’ll have to surmount to get the most of the action. It will take lots of practice, but to practice all of these skills you have only two options... begin play on the first level (which limits you from using the vast majority of the units, abilities and functions) or sit and click through lengthy twenty minute training session 4 to gain the right to free experimentation with one of the three competing forces. Neither option is tenable, so you are forced to learn on the fly.

Which would be fine, except that on almost every mission you are saddled with a secondary commander, intended to be a Co-op partner if you can rope a friend into this silly business with you. The Co-commander is a nightmare... liable to eat up all of your resource and go win the game for you while you struggle to remember how to select a mixed set of your own units. I found it impossible to compete with my computer-controlled ally... the opponent never even entered into the equation!

So what to do... the only option was to try and enlist the aid of my erstwhile cousin and occasional video game partner CotangentX. CotangentX, it should be stated for the record, is far, far superior to me when it comes to strategy games. He used to maddeningly defeat me in Starcraft back in the day, inevitably destroying my burgeoning military outpost just as my first offensive units were getting off the ground. So, I was acutely aware that here I was swapping one annoyingly competent ally for another, but at least CotangentX’s soon to develop inevitable victories for our team would leave me feeling pleasingly smug, rather than sadly out of the loop.

And ContangentX really did his best to help me along, clearly and painfully holding back on “commanding and conquering” enemy forces to allow me to plod along at “suggesting and circumventing” speed. It was right nice of him, and things seemed to be working out for a time, but then the second big design issue began to rear its ugly head... the unexpected extra mission.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you and your bud have been carefully building up your forces and extending your influence across a gigantic European map, using all of your resources for a satisfying alpha strike on your objective. The strike goes off as planned, a nice overwhelming victory and the conclusion of several hours investment of your hard-earned time. Suddenly, the game announces that you have just been given a new, extra mission, incongruous with the development that you have previously attained.... say, like “protect this silo” after having won an ocean battle. You are given five minutes to prepare your defenses... an impossibly small amount of time as most of your assets are tied into the wrong kind of units, and suddenly the enemy forces swarm in and it is game over because you hadn’t prepared for this unexpected hitch.

Yes, this kind of thing happens in real world warfare all the time, but that clearly isn’t any kind of excuse. Despite efforts to the contrary, Real Time Strategy as a genre already operates under a large amount of repetition... on each level you tend to spend the time building up the same forces, working through the same technology tree, up until you are ready to deploy and destroy. Faced with the prospect of repeating the entire three hour mission that my cousin and I had just completed... and then to face a similar prospect on the next level and the next... well, I think CotangentX expressed it best as he calmly sent his copy of C&CRA back to the rental agency... “Meh.”

The actors and cut-scenes in Red Alert are great... a lot of fun to watch. Which is why I fully intend to look them all up on YouTube any day now. As to the genre of real time strategy games... well, I think I’ll leave Halo Wars to somebody else. Until Starcraft II inevitably draws me back in... sayonara.

Will I play it more: If I could just get Hasselhoff to play Co-op...