Command & Conquer Red Alert is easy to play and highly addictive - plus, it puts the fate of the world in your hands!

Average Customer Review: ( 45 customer reviews )
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Now to the game. Yes red alert is now an old game by PC standards. The graphics are still ok but not obviously up to snuff compared to tiberian sun or it's sequal red alert 2. Never the less red alert is a blast and might still be the most enjoyable, playable game in the whole command and conquer seris including those newer games. Anybody familiar with any one CnC game basically knows how to play them all because the concept is the same. You need two resources to function. The most important resource is had by making refineries and sending out harvesters to gather it. In this game it is called ore, in tiberian sun it is called tiberian but it all doesn't matter because the entire game is focused on getting as many harvesters at work as possible and protecting them so you have the credits neccesary to build your military. From an offensive perspective of course you want to try and cut off your opponents harvesters and that's at least half the game. The other resource is power which is easily had by building power plants from time to time.

The game features two very evenly matched sides in a mostly conventional military battle. The russians and the ukrainians on one side and the allies on the other with germany, france and england. The russians and the ukrainians have the bigger more powerful tanks, a heavy tank and the mammoth. The allies have tanks that are smaller quicker and cheaper. The russians can make deadly telsa coils for defense which electrocute the enemy while the ally countries can make cheaper better armoured conventional turrets and pill boxes. The russians can make a substantial air attack with fast flying mig bombers and yaks. The allies are limited to helecopters but can make a real navy with destroyers and crusiers while the other side can only make defensive submarines. The sides are balanced and which country you choose to play with will be determined by the map. If the map has lot's of water on it you may prefer to be one of the ally countries so you can build a navy.

Overall the action is constant and the battles can be intense. One of the things that sets this game and all the CnC games apart from other rts games is that these games are much more base camp limited. In this game you have a command center and you build around it. You can make a sevice depot and then make an mcv but you still have to place it down some place and build around it. Those who are more used to games like total annililation or age of empires may find this confining. In those games you have mobile units that allow you to build anything anywhere on the map irregardless of how close or far they may be from another structure or unit. Here you have to build within the camp and while you can make mcv's and build other camps they are not easy to protect and mcv's are expensive. Normally in the course of a game you may have your major camp and one smaller additional one whose purpose is to protect you harvesters as they have to go out further and further for ore.

Overall red alert is a very fun well balanced game that still has many followers today. Go on mplayer or westwood and you will find dozens even hundreds of players. There are dozens of good downloads available online including mega maps and desktop theme packs. I highly recommend the coop maps which allow you and a bud to ally and take on a super charged AI opponent. With coop you can really play as a single team where each player can control the others units and the maps are great.

Finally, don't buy this game package. You can buy just red alert for $ so why pay more for this? Also red alert is now available in a couple of nice game packages. You can buy red alert and gettysburg along with another rts game in one package and another package allows you to buy 10 games including this one.

4 of 4 found the following review helpful:

World War 2 Just Changed...Jun 14, 2000
By Ian Richards
In C&C: Red Alert (in case you don't already know) you fight an alternate World War 2, in which Germany, Britain, Greece and all the other Western European countries fight against the might of the Soviet Union. The game is a classic, and the scientific details are well thought out. (Tesla now devotes his time to weapons research for the Soviets, while Einstein is the key to a secret Allied weapon) Buy the game - you won't regret it.

15 of 20 found the following review helpful:

superior by farApr 12, 2000
By K. Olff
i got this game, oh i dont know, 3 years ago, and could not wait for the release of Tiberium sun, but what i found was just a souless shell of a game.

The original red alert was balanced but still diverce. Foucused on planing, strategy, and cunning. Balanced gameplay is the key. whereas the new tiberium sun may look pretty, the game is just the same rehashed harvest, build, rush, brining nothing new to the genre.

i love Red alert, my first foree into the multiplayer world, everyday after school, i would play modem games. who knows how many hours i logged playing it. Buy Red alert, a great great game. Whereas Tiberium sun is not worth the time of day, it is pretty, and thats about it. There are no downsides to anything, every unit is too good for its own good. NO balance, no gameplay, no fun.

Westwood, hoping to cash in on the RTS gravy train pumped out its newest contender, tiberium sun, without putting any soul behind it. Buy red alert, or total annihilation or homeworld, games that truly revolutionized the RTS world and will give you a worthwhile time that would warrent you shelling out your cash for.

3 of 3 found the following review helpful:

Very cool!Feb 13, 2001
By B. GOODWIN "dragon678"
I bought this as part of package deal that had Red Alert & both upgrades and man, what a deal. This is a very cool game with some great gameplya, battles, on cut scenes that wer just too cool. The only thing bad about this game was the multiplay. Seemed like the Russians had too much of an advantage. you always had to over for paratroopers dropping behind your lines, otherwise you lost something critical plus the Russians got to make bombs which caused alot of damage. I played a freind of mine and beat him 8 straight times before he wouldn't play me anymore. That was the first time I ever played the game and I was always the Russians. Other than that, this was too cool. you get to play both sides and alot of the levels are very challenging. A must for any Command & Conquer fan and realtime game lovers.

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