IGN: First Look
Walkthrough:
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Trailer:
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Red Alert 3, of course, is the latest sequel to the famed Command & Conquer franchise, and being a Red Alert game means that it will possess the series' standout qualities. We're talking time travel, alternate histories, over-the-top units, and quite a bit of campy live-action cutscenes with scenery-chewing performances. Going into a recent appointment to see the game, we knew that Red Alert 3 would be about another alternate universe where the Soviets, facing defeat, go back in time and assassinate Albert Einstein to rewrite history. (This is a tip of the hat to the first Red Alert, where Einstein goes back in time to whack Hitler and rewrite history.) Unfortunately, and perhaps expectedly, unintended consequences complicate things, and pretty much all the Soviets wind up doing is unleashing the Empire of the Rising Sun, a new third faction based more or less in Japan. So now it's the Soviets versus the Allies versus the Japanese.
Based on our first look (and you can experience a demonstration similar to our own in the narrated video above), this seems to be a bright, supersaturated game. The graphics engine is an evolved version of the one found in Command & Conquer 3, but the key difference is the colorful art style that makes Red Alert 3 almost look like a comic book. Producer Amer Ajami tells us that the bright tone is on purpose, as the Red Alert games are supposed to be fun while the C&C games based on the Tiberium franchise are darker in tone.
Based on our first look (and you can experience a demonstration similar to our own in the narrated video above), this seems to be a bright, supersaturated game. The graphics engine is an evolved version of the one found in Command & Conquer 3, but the key difference is the colorful art style that makes Red Alert 3 almost look like a comic book. Producer Amer Ajami tells us that the bright tone is on purpose, as the Red Alert games are supposed to be fun while the C&C games based on the Tiberium franchise are darker in tone.
Should a battle start going poorly it's possible to pack up the mobile construction vehicle and head out to sea. You can establish bases on the water as well as on land, and many building types, such as airfields, work on both. The idea is that if your opponent has a lot of land-only units, you can seek safety upon the seas and vice versa. The naval battles will be fully fleshed out with hydrofoils, Tesla-armed stingrays, aircraft carriers, dreadnaughts and more. And for fun, there are dolphins with sonic emitters. Fans of the animal kingdom can also look forward to parachuting armored bears and attack dogs. There are about 70 units in the game, so we're barely scratching the surface here.
We didn't get a chance to see the single-player campaign, which is also playable entirely as a two-player cooperative experience. On that note, we did learn that the game will ship with built-in VOIP technology to allow you and a friend to talk to one another over the Internet. Or, you could get the Xbox 360 version, which will use Xbox Live and will be identical in terms of content, though it will have a specialized interface that was introduced in the console version of C&C 3.
What's noteworthy is that the game is well along in the development process, which means that we shouldn't need to wait till 2009 for this to come out. If everything goes on track, Red Alert 3 will launch simultaneously on the PC and Xbox 360 later this year.
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Trailer:
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