Micro Review: Red Alert 3
I'll skip a full break down of Red Alert 3, as I've already covered a fair bit of it in my review of the beta. Not much changed from the beta in terms of units or balance, so this is more to do with the single player campaign. Since that review however, I've played/completed Red Alert 2/Yuri's Revenge so I have a bit more insight to the Red Alert series.
Campaign
The story starts by the defeated Soviet forces going back in time to kill Einstein, the man who "won them the war" with his technology in Red Alert 2. When the Soviets return, they find not everything was how they'd imagined with a new "technologically superior" enemy, The Empire of the Rising Sun, emerging from nowhere.
The three factions, Allies, Soviets and Empire of the Rising Sun all start from the same spot but fork out to create their own "destiny" and ultimately victory at the expense of the other two. This raises the interesting question of what's considered cannon in the storyline - traditionally in all Command and Conquer games, it has been the Allies/GDI/"good guys in general" whose storyline is considered correct for the proceeding games. As such, they've always been the first campaign offered, but in Red Alert 3, the Soviet campaign is offered first.
My problems with the series isn't exclusive to Red Alert, but to nearly anything that creates a series out of time travelling. In Red Alert specifically, time travelling just gives the an easy out (in every episode!) to screw with the previous games story and never build on it. The Allied and Soviet forces are mostly made up of units/etc from the previous game, nothing really "new and game changing".
Bottom line
The bottom line is I'd give the game a two and a half stars out of five; while it is a solid RTS series it is getting old rehashing essentially the same story formula of the previous games, including Command & Conquer.
2 ½ / 5
