Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 beta initial impressions
As I've stated before, I've not always been a fan of the Command & Conquer series of real-time strategy games. In the mid-to-late 1990s, the RTS landscape was dominated by two key players, Westwood Studios and Blizzard Entertainment, with Westwood's Command & Conquer games pitted against Blizzard's Warcraft (and later Starcraft). While I know that many gamers were able to enjoy both, the majority seem to have come down firmly on one side or the other, and I was a staunch loyalist of the Blizzard camp. For me, their games were always more intuitive, tactile and polished, offering an overall more pleasant experience. In contrast, I tended to find Westwood's games more finicky, frequently suffering from mushy, indistinct graphics, control issues and a general lack of a meaningful connection (a typical Command & Conquer game tended to consist of cranking out as large an attack force as possible and rushing the enemy en masse, whereas Blizzard's games tended to stress quality over quantity, forcing the player to make strategic decisions about which units to build).
Times, however, have changed. Westwood Studios is no more, and the last RTS Blizzard put out was Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos in 2002 (with an expansion set in 2003). The publisher of the Command & Conquer games, Electronic Arts, established their own studio, EALA, to continue development of the franchise, beginning with the rather poorly-received 2003 spin-off Command & Conquer: Generals. In the meantime, while Blizzard arguably continued to dominate the RTS market, particularly as far as E-sports are concerned, several other franchises emerged to compete, muddying the waters somewhat and meaning that the old C&C/-craft binary no longer existed.
In 2007, the Command & Conquer series was resurrected with Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars, which, coincidentally or not, was the first one I genuinely enjoyed. I picked up a copy of the game in April, and then snagged the Kane's Wrath expansion set in July. Since then, both have remained on my hard disk and have been played rather obsessively. I'm not sure precisely what EALA did, but they managed to turn my thoughts on the franchise around completely, allowing me to enjoy their game in a way that I never could with Westwood's efforts. (This turnaround, incidentally, mirrors my experiences with the Tomb Raider franchise, which I believe improved exponentially when Crystal Dynamics took over from Core Design.)
Kane's Wrath came with a free key to enter the beta test of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, the third instalment in the spin-off Red Alert franchise. (While the vanilla Command & Conquer series takes place in the future, the Red Alert games operate in an alternate reality Cold War scenario in which Hitler never came to power and the Soviet Union emerged as the dominant adversary to the Allies in Europe.) My account was activated this morning, and I've spent most of the day getting the hang of it. (Normally I'd be at work, but we're all on strike today over a pay dispute.) The beta supports only online play, without any means of learning the ropes before jumping on to the Internet and invariably taking a savage beating from more experienced players. Four maps are provided, as well as all three playable factions: the Allies, the Soviets and the new Empire of the Rising Sun (i.e. Japan).
Whereas vanilla Command & Conquer has always offered a semi-realistic take on the world, the style of Red Alert is altogether more exaggerated, with units that range from your traditional infantry to armoured bears who can be shot out of cannons and parachuted into the enemy base. Much like the franchise's famous FMVs, all of this is done in a firmly tongue-in-cheek manner, resulting in a rather silly but nonetheless engaging experience. Visually, the colour palette is a good deal more saturated than that of Tiberium Wars, and accordingly the unit and building designs are more exaggerated, looking chunkier and more toy-like. Lower-grade units such as infantry are still a bit too small on the screen, making it difficult to distinguish between, say, a Peacekeeper and a Javelin Soldier (a long-running complaint I have with these games), but otherwise the design is bold, striking and richly saturated.
Otherwise, the mechanics are largely the same as those of Tiberium Wars. The unit names and designs may be different, but the basic principles are more or less unchanged. The biggest monkey wrench comes in the form of the added emphasis on naval combat. Many buildings and a few units as well can be placed on both land and sea, which gives the gameplay an added dimension. I still haven't quite got the hang of it (naval combat was always my weakest point in RTSes like Warcraft II and Age of Empires), but it seems fun and adds a degree of variety to the tactics that are available to you.
Right now, certain aspects of the gameplay do feel rather unwieldy, although there's nothing here that can't be changed with a bit of balancing and polishing. The controls seem a tad unresponsive, a combination (I suspect) of lag on the beta server and the fact that, like Tiberium Wars, the frame rate has a forced cap of 30 fps (words cannot express how much this irritates me, especially in a fast-paced game like this). Likewise, the interface looks and feels somewhat clunky, which is odd given that it's virtually identical to the one used in the previous Command & Conquer games. That aspect of the art could, I suspect, do with a bit of a polish to make things feel a bit more finished. Also, it may just have been my experience, but currently the Allies feel somewhat underpowered in comparison to the two other races. So far, the only game I've won while playing as them was against a complete beginner who hadn't even managed to build any troops before I steamrolled his/her base, whereas I had considerably more successes while playing as the Soviet Union. I haven't tested the Empire of the Rising Sun to any great extent yet, although their heavy emphasis on mechanical, "Transformers"-like units it's really to my personal tastes. Oh, and I've experienced a fair number of crashes and connection failures, but that's par for the course with unfinished software.
Overall, what I've seen looks fairly promising. Tiberium Wars definitely has a slicker, more polished feel, and it's unclear whether this discrepancy is down to the fact that Red Alert 3 is still in beta, but I'd hazard a guess that, with just over two months to go before release, there won't be any major changes made to the core mechanics between now and then. On balance, therefore, while the saturated, exaggerated world of Red Alert 3 appeals more to my tastes than the more realistic, sci-fi-oriented Tiberium Wars, I could see myself sticking with the latter in the long run.
|
