Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3 - Uprising

Uplifting or downgrading?

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The more the RTS genre progresses past the mould Westwood helped fashion, the fresher each subsequent update to Command & Conquer becomes. It's almost unique now, a solitary entity extolling the hyperbolic virtues of rolling a squad of fifty tanks to an enemy base and watching everything explode between intermittent clicking. It's big, and it's silly, and now the Russians have a motorcycle decked out with a Molotov equipped sidecar. It's called the Mortarcycle.

Failing that, the Japanese have a floating battleship in the shape of a lotus leaf that transforms into a giant, robotic samurai head and shoots devastating lasers from its mouth.

Red Alert 3: Uprising is still as delightfully gaudy as the game it expands upon. It's all about flash. The vivid colours still blare out of the screen, right down to the bold yellow outlines of your selected units. The big difference is that the exaggerated gameplay has been ramped up even more to the point that it's reaching critical mass. Whereas Red Alert 3 made you take a few seconds to consider ground and naval assaults, Uprising wants nothing more than for you to construct a gigantic squad and plough through the opposition. By creating a devout singleplayer expansion, EA have completely done away with the need to create balanced squads. This means the new units are grand, brash and ridiculously good fun, but at the cost of the co-op campaign and competitive multiplayer.

The logic is sound, at least: far more people play RTS games offline than in multiplayer modes, yet so much of the development process revolves around balancing the units for the online game. Focusing solely on singleplayer should, logically, make a singleplayer game that's entertaining. When you're freezing an entire fleet of enemy infantry with your ice-spraying Allied troopers, you can see why the multiplayer has been done away with.

Yet, removing the multiplayer never stops being a shame. Salt is rubbed into the wounds by the new Skirmish maps, all of which are lovely and demand to be ported over to the vanilla Red Alert 3 game as soon as possible. Playing against the AI just isn't the same.

The new singleplayer levels, as you might expect, demand the use of the new units. They've designed them for a reason, after all. And, for what it's worth, they're a lot of fun. But it's also a bit of a shame to see the game reduced to such an overtly simplistic formula. Such straightforwardness results in levels that are perfectly functional but never spectacular. They've obviously tried to keep the game accessible to the rather meaty segment of the market who neglected to play Red Alert 3, but it sometimes feels like they're trying too hard to change what wasn't broken to begin with.

It's a standalone expansion, but it's very much an epilogue to the original game. There are new levels for all the factions, billed as 'mini-campaigns', charting the aftermath of Red Alert 3. They're not lying, either: they really are noticeably short. And for such a petite experience, you'll find you're often experiencing missions laid out in the exact same way, eventually culminating in the construction of a huge base then a mass-production of whatever particular unit you're being encouraged to use on the level. Followed by you winning.

A lot of it is spent focusing on the FutureTech Company and their tenacious grip on the world's technology market. They're addressing a continuity error, you see, because when Premier "Tim Curry" Cherdenko killed Einstein at the start of Red Alert 3 it is never explained how the current alternate reality still afforded the Allied forces all of their temporal-based wizardry. But, then, it doesn't matter: in a game where you can shoot infantry out of cannons and bark enemies to death by loading dogs into APC's, how exactly one particular faction managed to retain their technology isn't something that needs to be addressed.

But addressed it is, in customary live-action cinematics. Malcolm MacDowell, Ric Flair, Holly Valance, Jodi Lyn O'Keefe and Jamie Chung all make an appearance, with Gemma Atkinson and Ivana Milicevic returning. They're so fundamental to the series that they're starting to collapse under their own self-effacing irony. Lines are, naturally, delivered in the part pastiche, part unenthusiastic nature we've all come to expect.

As a bit on the side you've also got the elfin three-level Yuriko campaign, which turns the game into a bit of a dungeon crawler. Stripped of her psychic limitations, and by fixing her to the centre of the screen, the developers have created another way of giving the player the opportunity to trawl around and blow stuff up. It's a bit of a shame that two of the three levels are set in the same location, but it does prove to be an amusing little distraction. The basic jist is that Yuriko has four primary powers, each with a cooldown time, and the gameplay revolves around juggling each ability competently. She's powerful, but can be easily torn to shreds when attacked by multiple units. It's certainly a welcome addition to the mix.

Rounding off the new content, EA have lifted the Kane's Challenge mode from the 360 port of Kane's Wrath and dressed it up as the Commander's Challenge feature in Uprising. Here you're given a specific objective and a selection of tools to achieve it with. What's surprising about them is just how easy they are to accomplish, most of them functioning in the same way as the rest of the game: build up an exhaustive fleet of your new, overpowered units and rush the enemy.

When it's all added up, Uprising is a generous package. Not as extensive as Kane's Wrath, but released at half the price, it offers you about a third of the original game. It's not remarkable, by any means, and though it's never dull it also never escapes the feeling of being an expansion by numbers. So much of it will ultimately come down to price: at 14.99 GBP it's a fairly steep prospect for what amounts to a long weekend of content. EA's contentious decision to ignore Steam and make it available solely on the EA Store and Direct2Drive will likely cause offence, too.

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By Martin Gaston