Red Alert 3: Commander’s Challenge is a strange product if ever there was one. It’s an expansion, and it’s almost what you might call an “old fashioned” expansion, the kind of product that dropped back in the days of Warcraft II, Ground Control, and Homeworld. Like those delectable offerings of old, it’s a collection of single player missions, a small spinoff to a larger RTS package. Unlike those odd bundles of story and strategy, this collection of single player missions has absolutely nothing to offer on the story/plotting front.
This may not seem like much. After all, Red Alert has doggedly, grinningly flaunted its trashy FMV cutscenes into the modern era, hiring new waves of slumming B-listers and up-and-coming C and D-listers to play their Russian scientists, American and British leaders, and tackily sexed-up “leading” ladies. It feels a lot like the 80’s in there, from the budget to the plots.
Then again, if you’re a Red Alert fan, you either love that stuff, or ignore it and go for the old-school RTS gameplay. Problem is, in this expansion, the bad stories are equaled by the mundane, boring missions. This expansion was released a while ago for PC, and it’s obviously taken some finagling on EA’s part to get it “ready” for the consoles. They’ve re-employed the original console Red Alert 3’s mediocre radial control scheme (will there ever be a console game that has a satisfying control scheme?), and added a few new units to emphasize the “expansion” angle.
Instead of picking one faction (or all three of them), you play the commander of a third force, who must slowly defeat members of the three original factions (the Japanese, the Russians, and the Allies). Every time you complete a challenge (and best a commander), you earn a new piece of technology. By the end of the many, many campaigns, you’ll have accumulated all of the traditional units, plus the new ones introduced in the PC expansion.
The strange thing is, what made the PC expansion slightly interesting was the back stories and explanations used to introduce the new units, and give the mini-campaigns direction and drive. They’ve been completely scrapped for this expansion, and you have to wonder why. Are console RTS players any less interested in the stories behind their units and the world they inhabit?
It doesn’t really matter, unfortunately, because aside from its story woes, this console port is substandard in several ways that have nothing to do with the core gameplay of the Red Alert games. Right off the bat, the controls are just as fiddly as they used to be. There’s no doubt that EA has figured out how to simplify a console RTS interface to the point where utility, depth, and ease of use meet. There’s also no doubt that they went and married all of that to a slightly slow, slightly imprecise reticule. Selecting units is chore, and managing large-scale confrontations (especially battles on multiple fronts) becomes increasingly difficult.
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