Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 (PC)
2 Fast 2 Superfluous
11/3/2008 9:30 PM | 31 Comments | Page 2 of 4
What's Hot: Superfast gameplay, if you're into that sort of thing
What's Not: Bad pacing; Uninspired design; Derivative units; Cartoony graphics; Juvenile cut scenes
A lot of the blame goes to the interface, which can't keep up. Although it has the same unit selection system as
Command & Conquer 3, complete with the helpful "drill down" option, it does nothing new to help you manage units' special abilities. For instance, if you select a mess of rocket launcher troops, there is no way to see how many are set to manual targeting and how many are set to laser targeting. You can eyeball it by looking at the actual troops and checking which ones have little lasers extending from their weapons. But the unit info display -- which is where you'd think you should be able to
check unit info -- has no indication of who's laser targeting and who's manually targeting. And short of carefully picking them out one-by-one on the map, there's no way to cull the laser targeters from the manual targeters.
À la mode
Pew, pew, you're dead.
Now you might think this is a relatively minor issue, and in the case of the rocket launcher troops, you'd be right. One mode does more damage but fires more slowly. It's a power-user feature. But consider that
Red Alert 3 bases an entire faction, the Japanese, on toggling units between two states. Many Japanese units play a very different role based on their current mode -- so if you've got a bunch of Tengu in their default anti-air mode and you're suddenly facing infantry, you'll want to quickly swap them to anti-infantry mode. But if they're not all in the same state, you have to manually select each of them. And you won't be able to use the unit selection system, because it doesn't have any information on which unit is set to which mode. Have fun hunting and pecking on the map.
Oh, wait, you're too late. Given the game's default and only speed, you cannot hunt and peck your Tengu during an attack. They're all dead now. Clearly, the game in general and the Japanese in particular were designed for forces to be divided into both modes, but the interface does nothing to help you manage this.
"I cast Magic Missile"
Kirov Airships are among the few units that'll lead to
Red Alert 2 nostalgia.
Then there are the units with special abilities, such as a dog barking to stun infantry, a submarine firing a powerful torpedo straight ahead, or a helicopter shooting a freeze beam at a single unit. Oh, wait, you're too late. Your units are either dead or you've already won the battle. And the more varied your army, the more special abilities you have to track. This is one of the only RTSes I've ever played that actually punishes you for combined arms: The more types of units you build, the more of the game's feature creep you'll have to manage. Call it "feature swarm."
In a more carefully built game, this could have worked. But here, where the design is subverted by the game's actual speed, it's a pacing problem -- for a wider audience, at any rate. This breakneck pace and emphasis on micromanagement might find an audience in the small world of competitive RTS gaming. Those guys will probably appreciate
Red Alert 3 as a test of skill; they'll consider Tengu management a critical part of the gameplay. But for those of us who play real-time strategy games as a test of tactics instead of reflexes, as a challenge of unit management instead of interface management, as a victory for he who plays smartest rather than he who practices most,
Red Alert 3 will be a colossal disappointment, especially considering the developer's track record. Here at last is fodder for the snotty strategy gamers who dismiss RTSes as twitch gaming. It's been a long time since they were so justified in that particular criticism.
