by alienjesus Fri May 28, 2021 6:07 am
I jumped into Command & Conquer: Red Alert tonight as the first game for my summer challenge.
I'm playing the Soviet campaign, mainly because I loved the Tesla Coils when I played this as a kid. I haven't actually been able to use them yet though, as the tech is limited in these earlier missions.
Just in case you might have had any doubts that you are the bad games, stage 1 of the Soviet campaign is a mission to crush a small rebellion, destory the village it was taking place in and kill all the civilians.
Stage 2 had be guarding a base, but in reality it was just an intro to base building, and the main objective was to go blow up the other guys as you might expect.
Stage 3 mixes things up with a mission to chase down and kill a spy before he escapes. You start the mission with only a pack of 5 attack dogs, and it's a bit of a puzzle mission in a way. The spy quickly escapes past an enemy pillbox which obliterates the dogs, but if you take a different path you can kill an enemy soldier guarding a building to release some riflemen to your side. They can shoot some explosive barrels to detonate the pillbox at range, allowing you to chase the spy. There's more tricks and traps as you progress - the spy enters a village where reinforcements attack you as you draw near, then escapes via across water via a carrier to a guarded and fenced off portion of the map you need grenadiers to attack. I eventuallu cleared the map with only a couple riflemen left over.
Stage 4 is a standard destory the base scenario, but mission 5 added some complications - you start on a landmass on the west of the map, and the enmy has a base in the centre north. There's also a large island in the loer right of the mpa the enemy has units on - you need to capture an enemy radar dome in their north base with an engineer and then clear all units from the island. I took too long seizing the north base though because the computer set up a second base on the island which made assaulting it way harder as I was limited to a few units at a time being dropped off by landing craft. I eventually set up a solid base of my own on the island too but then tragedy struck. I paused the game to go get some food, came back and found that ...I had not paused the game. The computer had destroyed my entire island base, and to boot I had no resources left on the main island to buy more stuff! Not ideal. Luckily, I had destroyed all the computers ore trucks and they were also out of money, so I still had the upper hand. I sold enough buildings to buy a new ore refinery, slowly worked enough money back up to buy 5 tanks and 5 V2 rockets, and stormed the island. I needed the rockets for the allied navy, as they were guarding the shores of the base. It was an ordeal, but I made it.
I'm having fun so far, looking forward to playing more. One thing I've noticed about the PS1 port is that it doesn't seem to contain brancinh missions like the PC version - there's only 1 version of each mission, even though the map in the FMV sequences often shows multiple options like the original game did. It's kind of weird, seeing as Command & Conquer 1 on PS1 managed to fit this mechanic in just fine, but not a deal breaker really - I'd only get to play one version of each mission in a single playthrough either way!