Red Alert 2 comes with two 12 mission campaigns, one played from the Soviet side, one from the Allied. Both take place on a variety of maps as the war rages across the globe. Chicago, New York, Washington DC, Paris, and Poland are just a few of the locations you'll visit on your world tour of destruction. The campaigns also provide a good variety of missions - from hard fought slugfests to puzzle-like missions that will require some thought to complete. All of this comes wrapped in two compelling storylines, one from each point of view, that are moved along through good quality video scenes between the missions.

One of the great things about the Red Alert 2 campaigns is that there is no single 'right' way to win each mission. The variety of units available gives the player many avenues to victory - subterfuge, brute force, death from above, to mention a few. This gives the missions good replay value as you can try a different strategy the second time around.

Red Alert 2 is real-time strategy gaming in its truest form. Those of you who are veterans of the Command & Conquer games, or RTS games in general, will have no trouble jumping right in and beginning play. In fact, you can bypass the tutorial entirely unless you are completely new to this type of game. Don't think of Red Alert 2 as just another RTS clone also-ran, though. It very adeptly avoids the "build massive amounts of a single unit and overrun your opponent's base" rut that plaques second-tier RTS titles. For one thing, there are a variety of defensive weapons available to each side. For another, both sides possess weapons that can wipe out a group of massed units with one fell swoop. You'll have to forgo the rush in Red Alert 2, it requires careful strategy and a balanced attack to come out ahead.

Structures take on an important role in Red Alert 2. Buildings can be fortified by soldiers, allowing them to concentrate their firepower while at the same time providing protection. In fact, units garrisoned inside of a building will take no damage until the structure itself is destroyed. There are also various tech buildings which give a bonus to the side which capture them with an Engineer. These include oil pumps which give a nice steady resource flow to their owner and airfields which provide periodic reinforcements through paratroop drops.

The two sides are not merely mirror images of each other as is many times the case in lesser quality RTS games. Also, each side does not have a direct 'counter unit' for each of the enemy's units. This means that different units, or combinations of units, are needed to fight off an attack, while some units will be utterly useless in the same situation. In fact, each side follows a very different military policy. The Allies feature air power, stealth, and high-tech units with longer build times. On the other hand, the Soviets are all about brute strength and fast production. They feature cheap, easy to produce weaker units combined with very powerful, very slow weapons of mass destruction.

« Page 1 · Page 3 »