An enjoyable RTS set in a crazy alternate timeline

Strange as it may sounds, I have never played a Command and Conquer game before. This is my first. And the only reason I did was on the recommendation of my regular co-op buddy. I have played my fair share of real time strategy games before such as the amazing Homeworld series, the Dawn of War series, Halo Wars and others but it’s usually not a genre that I swarm to like a moth to a flame. I was promised this one was a lot of crazy mad cap fun though so I went in optimistic.

And it was a lot of mad-cap fun. But apart from that, it was a fairly standard RTS affair with a few exceptions:

• A huge all star cast with the likes of Tim Curry, Jonathan Pryce, George Takei, J.K Simmons, Jenny McCarthy and more.
• The action takes place over land, sea and air meaning you have to watch all 3 fronts at once.

The plot picks off after Red Alert 2 (which I had not played) where the Soviet Union was about to be done in. But conveniently, they have invented a time machine and travel back in time to kill Albert Einstein and change history making them and the Japanese Empire both global powers again along with the Allies so all 3 are at war again. But due to the lack of Nuclear weapons, some new super weapons have been invented such as satellites than can pull units from space, huge mechs, and vacuum bombs. All very fun stuff and makes each side have it’s own drawbacks and benefits.

There are 3 campaigns, one for each side, each with it’s own story and while none of the campaigns are terribly long in number of missions, they do still take quite a long time because the difficulty ramps up quite quickly and considerably meaning most of the later missions will take you many many attempts. We only did the Soviet campaign and even it took a good 10 hours.

It was also an incredibly demanding game for the year it was released (2008). I was playing it on a machine built to a good spec in the same year and even it was struggling. But because of this, it does look very nice indeed.

Apart from that, there’s not a huge amount else I feel I have to say about it. It was a normal RTS kind of encounter and one you will enjoy if you are an RTS fan but fairly unremarkable otherwise apart from the hilarious cast and scripting. A solid effort.