• CNC3 REPLAYS • CNC3 Strategy Guide • Screenshot Gallery • CNC Game Store   New

• CNC3 Cheats | CNC Clans • Command Conquer 3 Actors! • CNC3 PodCasts • Useful Sites

• The Latest News • About CNC3 • Gamer Web Hosting • Contact Us

• System Requirements • Meet Joe Kucan • Electronic Arts • About Us

	Bookmark This Page    Link To This Page    E-Mail Page To A Friend

Red Alert 3 Expert Review

By forum member Overmind

General Situation & Issues:

The money is plentiful. The resources are gathered ultra-fast. Playing 3rd side I managed to tech-up immediately with only two refineries build at the start location right adjacent to the resource-extracting-structures (ore mines, as EA calls them). Spam wars 2.0 ... here they come!

The maps also have enough ore mines. Not that you'd need any more than two, but of course by capturing them you will have massive $ flow and the advantage that comes with that.

Regarding neutral structures, you can capture oil derricks. You also find radar towers, which are near useless to capture because they will only give you local radar (map reveal) around them and that's useless because since you got there, you already scouted the near-grids. Only capturing them all will have a spy-sat effect and reveal the whole map. You can also find dry docks and hospitals. Once captured, they will give you auto-repair for ships and auto-heal for infantry.

A strange thing about the environment: cars are somehow part of the texture and cannot be destroyed or damaged.

There is an interesting 'units vs. turrets issue': your units can attack your own turrets, but the turrets can't force-fire on your own units.

All techs are unlocked either by upgrading each structures or upgrading the ConYard (Except Soviets). The Battlelab really loosed its usefulness at this point.

Support powers work similar to Generals, where you distribute points to enable them. The difference is, you will get points after a while even if you don't destroy anything.

Side-specifics:

Allies:
They have almost standard construction system. The airfield can build 4 air units which is way too much. The bombers at least are very redundant.

To advance the tech, you increase the clearance level of your ConYard (this is relatively simple).

Prism tech is still there, even if 'they' stated it won't be. The prism tower works fine. And the prism tank is replaced by something more fancy that fires beams from above, but the general purpose remains unchanged.

I find it bad that the Mirage Tank does way too much damage to structures. This supposed to be an ambush unit, not an assaulter.

Aircraft carrier is ok... it now has 5 attack fighters. The problem is 3 of them remained stuck in the air after destroying the target structure. Well, actually only their ghosts.

After I attacked another structure, 5 brand-new ones spawned. The bug is as follows (fairly simple): the drones that don't get to fire their shots (because the structure died from one of the drones in front) are the ones that get stuck in mid-air.

Special powers:
It's worth mentioning the Chrono bomb. This is a stolen idea with a bad implementation. It can be found in my RA2 Apocalypse mod as Chrono A-Bomb. The implementation is bad because...well...in my mod it costs 10k to build one and it could be stopped with chrono-beam-based tech. Here you can use it for free very often and it does devastating damage and I don't think you can stop it (maybe engineer should defuse it ? - but the time is too short for that anyway). This will lead to a very unbalanced situation.

An interesting power is the Chrono swap. Unfortunately it's bugged. You can use it with infantry and they won't die. That's bad since chronoshifting suppose to kill infantry units.

Superweapon:
Chronosphere - incredible - this one actually almost works like it suppose to. Oh...wait... I had to say that - wrong - it doesn't! Not at all! You can't chronoshift docked planes. At least chronoshifting amphibious units didn't kill them. And then I had to do it. I wanted to check if the structures get damaged if you chronoshift something over them and i tested this with an Allied Aircraft Carrier. Surprise: It was chronoshifted on land and stucked between my power plants!

Soviets:
The build system has the disadvantage that the structures are built after actually being deployed. This is compensated by the multiple build tabs available by building cranes. Dreadnought and the V launcher do low damage, so you'll need a lot of them to actually damage bases. A thing to note: Apocalypse tanks can phase through Soviet walls. Interesting bug.

The one I personally liked is the magnetic Satellite. It's a beam that takes units away in space. I found it to be quite good … if you know how to use it right. And it works for air units too. One more thing: the units you get to space can be dropped later as debris with the Orbital Drop power.

Superweapon:
Iron Curtain - this is the most close to a functional thing in the whole game. It works on land and water. The texture on the units while active is acting strange, though. First time it was something brownish and ugly and then it was a nice dark red like in the SS below.

The IC effect can also look black.

A good thing about the both Iron Curtain and Chronosphere is that both can still cover 3x3 cells, having effect on 9 units.

3rd Side:
The basics here are the cores. Those build quite fast and can deploy anywhere...which is good (for 3rd side at least). Unfortunately deploying cores will give you the respective ability before the structure is actually deployed (i.e. Nano Shield is available before the structure is fully deployed).

All unit production structures (Barracks, War Factories and NavYards) must be teched-up to unlock more advanced units.

All 3rd side units fire something cyan-bluish (either beams or projectiles). I guess the designer's eyes remain abnormally tuned to the blue end of the color spectrum even with that much Soviet red around.

All units look like Japanese cartoons more or less, culminating with the Striker VX that looks like a metal chicken (in ground mode).

Be careful when firing their artillery sine the beam has a rail gun effect and will destroy anything in its way including your own units.

You can find here a flyer called Rocket Angel... kind of like the Allied Rocketeer from RA2. This is one unit gone from Allied to 3rd side. The other one is the Aegis Cruiser.

Kind Oni does not do that huge amount of damage most of you hoped for. Actually it took quite a few shots to destroy a civilian structure. Also, his ramming ability does not work exactly correctly. If you use it out of range, he will just ram thin air instead of getting closer and then use the ramming thing. And when I wanted to ram a structure it bypassed it.

Special powers:
Nothing really interesting here; suicide planes were to be expected. The thing I liked is the balloon-bombs. A copy of the old para-bombs... but they look weird and explode nice and that's a good thing.

Superweapon:
Nano Swarm - well... it's a shield that has a really bad texture (bluish hexes) and its top is missing. It can be said it's kind of a Static Iron Curtain with larger radius. This is only the lack of imagination from someone if you ask me.

Overall Impression:

Judging things overall, the game does look above average, but from a RA1/RA2 player's perspective it's not good. This is probably because they tried to make things too different for the factions, resources are still too high and the units are just the strictly required ones with no extra additions. A lot of things are gone and it seems the improvements and additions present don't make up for them. That does not mean that the game won't be good. It just means it won't be up to the level of RA1 or RA2. Now we just have to wait for the final version. Maybe we'll see some surprises yet.

	Enter your search terms Submit search form
	Web CommandConquer3.com