Gameplay

Interface

The interface for the game should be familiar to Westwood fans. You don't click on buildings to produce units or research upgrades as you do in other RTS games. Instead, you manage your production using the menu along the right side of the screen that contains thumbs of all your important buildings and units.

New to Red Alert 2 are handy tabs that organize all the buildable items into four categories, including structures, infantry, and vehicles. Players will also appreciate the build queue that allows you to order up to 99 of each unit type for production (not that you'll ever have enough money to do it).

Fall back!

Attack!

Single Player Campaign

During our stay at Westwood, we had enough time to play through about half of the 12 mission Allied campaign and a couple of the Soviet missions as well. True to Westwood form, the single player missions are bursting with full motion video that helps convey the storyline. Gamers might recognize the faces of some of the Hollywood talent in these videos -- Kari Wuhrer ("Sliders," Thinner) plays Tanya, the hot tempered female commando on the Allied side, while Twin Peaks' Ray Wise plays the role of the US President.

The videos do a great job at telling the story, and more importantly, transitioning the player from one mission to the next. I tried the Allied campaign first, and kept telling myself to stop after the next mission to sample the Soviet campaign, but the videos compelled me to keep playing further and further into the Allied missions.

Back in base

Feeling better?

My favorite mission from the play testing session involved running Tanya (the sniper/demolitions expert) and a handful of Spies through a maze of guards, attack dogs, and Tesla Coils in an attempt to detonate a couple of Soviet nuclear missile silos. The mission required that you use the Spies to infiltrate into the base, and shut off the power generators so Tanya could get past the Tesla Coils, kill the guards, and detonate the missiles. Normally this is an easy task, since Spies can walk by enemy troops undetected. However, the attack dogs aren't fooled by Spies, so it took some precise timing to make it past the dog patrols.

The AI exhibited some savvy, even on the easy difficulty setting (the machine was set up for me that way. I didn't pick it, I swear!). On one particular mission, I was slowly advancing my allied forces with infantry out in front of the armor columns, to protect the vehicles from Soviet Terror Drones -- a fast moving unit specialized for taking out tanks and other vehicles. I watched as a group of Terror Drones danced a circle around the infantry escort and attacked an exposed flank in the armor column, all while staying carefully out of range of my GIs' machine guns. So much for deploying the GIs in their sandbags, which immobilized them; the Terror Drones decimated half of the Grizzly tanks.

Battle shot

a little later

Like Westwood's previous RTS titles, the single player campaign of Red Alert 2 will not disappoint. Our only complaint is that it doesn't ramp you up to the advanced units quickly enough. However, that doesn't detract a whole lot from the fun, and especially the slick FMV.