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Command & Conquer: Red Alert gives you the opportunity to be more devious, cunning, and ruthless than ever before. Easy to play and highly addictive, Red Alert puts the fate of the world in your hands.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Your entry into the world of Real Time Strategy,
This review is from: Command & Conquer: Red Alert (Jewel Case) (CD-ROM)
This isn't the first, or latest or even the best Real Time Strategy game ever made, but it's perhaps the best first game for those new to the genre. In RTS, you build up both an army and the industrial base with which to create the army. There is some valuable resource (here, the famed "Tiberium") which fuels your war mchine and that of your opponent. The inherent unrealism of RTS - you build the base and the army not only in real time, but in a rather short amount of it - is more than compensated by the tenacity and resourcefulness of your enemy, the obstacles you face and the myriad strategies you must quickly use to overcome both. "Red Alert" is actually a prequel to "Command and Concquer" which pit the noble - if militaristic - Global Defense Initiative against the insidious cultish Brotherhood of Nod. In RA, we find the younger GDI facing a massive war machine fielded by Josef Stalin's USSR. How did that happen? What about WWII? Never took place - Hitler was some out of work painter and Austrian army vet when he died under mysterious circumstances after a 1924 meeting with somebody named Einstein. Now the Soviets and the GDI fight using weapons that vary between conventional and (by our standards) exotic. In addition to your tanks, planes and ships, you must also contend with Tesla Coils (artificial lighting generators), chronospheres (remember the "Philadelphia Experiment"?) and the "Iron Curtain". You get to play each side, and must deal with each one's respective weakenesses - the allies are better represented on sea where their cruisers and gunboats annhilate russian subs; Russian MiG's, however, dominate the sky). Anybody whose RTS experience goes no further than "Dune II" (1992) best be warned - this is more than about tank-rushing. simply cranking out a dozen or so of your heaviest and most fearsome mechanized armored assets and sending them headlong at your enemy's weakest point is not the single strategy. As an exmple - one mission may have you decimate the GDI base on the other side of the river. However, there are no bridges (at least none that last very long). So you've got to build marine transports to carry your army across - but that requires a subpen. To protect your subpen (which is built on the water) and the transports when they're built, you'll need to crank out subs (which are inferior to the enemy's surface fleet, but remain the only real option). Also, your transports can only load and offload their cargoes on sandy stretches of shoreline - and the only non-rocky coastline just happens to be occupied by the enemy. The allies may also have spies - who can walk past tanls and soldiers without being spotted (only your canine units know when they're around), and the feared "Tanya", a sexy "Rambette" who can pick off scores of infantry like pigeons and responds with the appropriate "Ka-chinG!!!" with every kill. Red Alert is incredibly challenging, not infrequently frustrating and quite addictive. An extensive internet community exists for those with questions or those hungering for new missions. I ran the game on my P-166MMX with no problems. Those with more powerful systems may want to consider "Red Alert-2", but they'd be missing an excellent intro to the genre.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Ah, A classic game.,
A Kid's Review
This review is from: Command & Conquer: Red Alert (Jewel Case) (CD-ROM)
Red Alert Is a very good games, while the graphics may not be so good, but hey, its a old game.Red Alert Is a very good RTS, where you build buildings for more units, war factories, yaks, Cruisers, Mammoth tanks, Light tanks, Helipad.... Very kool. In the game you collect ore by using ore miners, ore is your money. The more you collect and have, the better you can afford to build buildings and units. There is a good variety of units, yup. The gameplay is very fast, and exciting.. You have to use strategies. You can play the game on Westwood online with real people, though in online games its very vulnerable to fall by people "rushing" you with tanks. The story is interesting, though the mission briefings the actors and script is a little funny, cheesy. And the gameplay is not as balanced as other games, and it has its own small faults like every game does. So, I rate it 4 stars
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I saw this item featured,
By
This review is from: Command & Conquer: Red Alert (Jewel Case) (CD-ROM)
...I have this game, it's a classic, and while I have played Starcraft, Warcraft I, Warcraft II, Red Alert 2, Tiberian Sun, the original Command & Conquer, Empire Earth, Age of Empires, Age of Empires II, all of these games' expansion packs, clones of these games, alterations of the genre like Myth I-III, Battlezone (but not Battlezone II, that wasn't as good as the original) I'd still have to say that I had the most fun playing this game of all of those other games. The focus now, sadly, seems to be on unit tactics. While fun, it never ever approached the level of fun or the need for nostalgia either(!) that was so well captured in this game.The previous reviewer who said that today's RTS games are too slow was correct. Red Alert really was about fast-paced battles, and the computer AI was one of the best and perhaps the most fun to play. One on one skirmishes against the computer, if played correctly, could be over in 10 minutes. The speed of the battles and the huge armies that you could create were amazing. The huge armies were only so much fun back then because they were actually hard to get. Now they are so easy. You build base defense, wait for your queues to finish, assign teams to numbers 1-0, and then move in to destroy player x. I play Red Alert 2 on the fastest speed setting and even then, the games always last twice and even three times as long as old Red Alert games. The acting and the stories in the movies was even better. The allied side had more character to it, unlike the RA 2 allies, who seem as deep as a sheet of paper. I especially missed the soviet side, which had more sense of story to it and Nadia's "Thanks... I made it myself," line. It was also nice to be in an actual briefing room with your other commanders as it gave a sense of urgency and made you actually fear for your life at times, not knowing what was going to happen in the movies. In short, the movies had more story to them, they were longer, and the characters were so much more memorable and at times believable. Superweapons were fun in the original RA, but now they seem corny in RA 2. As for unit tactics, you won't find them in this game but you'll find much more than that. You'll find battle tactics. Unit tactics, I think, were an effort to improve micromangement by making it more fun. And to some degree, it is, but it tires easily. That first big rush by the computer is something I miss a lot. The computer just keeps sending tank after tank after tank and you can never have good enough base defense. I also remember playing modem games allied with a friend of mine against the computer, and they were much more fun than any online games of Starcraft (which is separated into about 5 main categories: rush, normal game with limited resources, BGH with unlimited resources, role-playing game, and survive for x minutes while defending x structure) and much better than any game of C&C tiberian sun, red alert 2, etc. Build queues, making individual units have special functions, and other things such as formation and unit behaviors are really quite crappy in comparison to the gameplay in this game. I still appreciate that stuff but I liked the urgency and fast-paced battles in this game. I know it's not nostalgia either. The first RTS game I played was Warcraft II, and I played lots of modem games with that as well. I don't think a game developer has to do more than create a solid game for it to have an audience. The only other game I could place in this "holy category" would have to be half-life. Prior to buying half-life, I had played Quake, Quake II, Wolfenstein, Doom, Doom 2, Duke Nukem 3d, etc. These two games weren't the first, but they're definitely the most polished. If someone made a Red Alert with updated graphics, I'd buy it right away. That's probably the only thing that made me stop playing. Other games had better graphics...
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