Reviews by Kyle Ellis

Before the widely hated and greedy company of Electronic Arts took over the beloved Command and Conquer series of Real Time Strategy games, there was good old Westwood Studios. This (now defunct) company put out all the games in the C&C series, up until 2003 when Generals came out. In 2000, they released Red Alert 2, which focuses on an alternate timeline where Adolf Hitler is killed by Einstein and thus sets into effect a war that is initiated because the USSR decides to invade europe. Red Alert 2 was a pretty good game. Not just gameplay wise, but also because of its complexity. You had to actually be intelligent to play it because you have a limited amount of money and resources, and it's up to you to manage them effectively. About a year later, Westwood once again delivered the goods in the form of Yuri's Revenge. Acting as RA2's only expansion, Yuri's Revenge picks up where the ending of Red Alert 2 left off, and sets up a new storyline that involves both the USSR and Allies trying to stop the psychopathic Yuri; a psychic who can mind control his enemies and is the former adviser to the Soviet leader Romanov. It's revealed that due to his ruthlessness, Yuri was most likely the real leader of the USSR in Red Alert 2, not his boss. Because Yuri's Revenge is an expansion pack, it requires RA2 in order to play, and is essentially the same game. It does however up the ante by including 7 brand new story mode levels for the Soviets and Allies (sadly there's no Yuri campaign), new vehicles, new voice acting, and new maps for the skirmish mode. The story mode in this is somewhat confusing and (admittedly) completely ridiculous. You're dealing with things such as time travel, mind control, and during the Soviet missions, you actually travel to the moon at one point to prevent Yuri from establishing a base there. The game still doesn't take itself all that seriously, which is good because if it did, the story would probably be terrible. Just like with my original Red Alert 2 review, I won't spoil what happens in either of the campaigns, but the new units given to each team definitely help out. The soviets get new vehicles such as the siege chopper, which fills the role of a helicopter (which they lacked in the original game). It can land and transform part of itself into a howitzer to pummel long range targets. The allies get things such as the battle fortress, a hulking monster of a vehicle that can crush smaller ones and load itself with up to 5 soldiers (who can fire from the inside). My favored team is still probably the Allies because they're better in the late game while the Soviets are better early on. The Soviets get a lot of tank units which makes them good at smashing enemies with overwhelming force, but later on, the Allies turn the tide with their superior air power and nasty special weapons. Things like the Chronosphere return from the original game, a device capable of teleporting vehicles anywhere in a flash, as well as gap generators, small towers that permanently blot out sections of the map for opponents. The Allies also have the upper hand when it comes to surveillance, using such structures as the spy satellite, which allows you to have full map vision at all times (unless it gets destroyed). This allows players to see everything their enemy is doing, which is a huge advantage. As stated earlier, there's unfortunately no story mode where you can play as Yuri's team, but his faction, simply titled "Yuri", is playable in skirmish and multiplayer. Doing so however is widely frowned upon, because if you know what you're doing, Yuri's team is insanely overpowered. His faction's playstyle requires a bit of getting used to and it's not the easiest team to get the hang of using, but a seasoned player will totally wipe the floor with you. Just to emphasize how unfair his team is, Yuri's standard infantry unit is a soldier which can set things on fire with his mind, and when garrisoned inside buildings, they do a nightmarish amount of damage to even the heaviest of vehicles. He also gets things such as the mastermind, which is basically a giant brain on tank tracks that can mind control up to three units at a time and make them fight for you. Trying to control more than three will cause the vehicle to take damage. The developers tried to balance Yuri's team somewhat by giving him weak tanks (such as the lasher), but they're still on par with the allied grizzly tanks in terms of armor. The acting in this game is still cheesy, but it helps make the whole experience more nostalgic for people who played this over 20 years ago. It's sad to realize that the actors in this game's cutscenes are all much older now and the guys who portrayed Einstein and Romanov are both dead. Just like the game it runs on, Yuri's Revenge suffers from a dire lack of support on modern operating systems. I've seen some people say that it crashes for them even more frequently than normal Red Alert 2 does, which is very frustrating. The game just wasn't designed with new computers in mind. Still, if you can manage to get it running, you'll find that Yuri's Revenge is a great add-on to Red Alert 2 (and its only one) because it introduces new levels, new units, new ways to play, and a very annoying new team to fight against (or as).

If I had to choose just one video game to play for the rest of my life and I wasn't allowed to play anything else, I would choose Generals. For the past 15 or so years, this game has been a huge source of enjoyment for me, due to its huge amount various units, buildings, usable strategies, and playable factions. Probably the best aspect about Generals is the huge amount of community content available for the game. People in the community make modifications for it in order to alter the way it plays, add new teams and vehicles, among other things. Because of this, I will not be talking about mods such as Shockwave or Rise of the Reds in this review. They're too different. I consider those things to be completely separate games in their own right. As for the base game itself (with no add ons), the first thing Command and Conquer fans probably noticed about Generals when playing it for the first time in 2003 is how radically different it is from previous games in this series. Whereas the previous C&C games got almost universal praise among fans, Generals was seen as something of a mixed bag. Previous installments such as Red Alerts 1 and 2 and Tiberian Sun had a varied, but well established formula: the Red Alert subseries of Command and Conquer focused on an alternate timeline where Einstein travels back in time and kills Hitler before he even has a chance to rise to power, therefore getting rid of world war 2 up until a certain point, where the USSR suddenly becomes aggressive and decides to take over europe. The Tiberian games focused on an entirely separate timeline from Red Alert, set in the near future (2030s) where a highly dangerous and toxic chemical substance called Tiberium crash lands on earth and starts spreading rapidly. A powerful military organization called the GDI (Global Defense Initiative) fights the Brotherhood of Nod in the depressing environment of a dying planet earth, and Nod, under their leader, Kane, tries to use the spread of Tiberium to their advantage to basically destroy the world. These two games have surprisingly depressing and dark storylines, but both the Red Alert and Tiberium games were always rooted in fiction. You can tell the actors involved had a lot of fun with them, and the games aren't really meant to be taken seriously. After all, in Red Alert 2, the Russians gain access to ridiculous weapons like armored blimps and giant squids that are mind-controlled to attack enemy warships. Getting back to Generals, lots of people who were fans of Command and Conquer didn't even like the game back then, seeing as how it is so drastically different from its predecessors. Generals is the first Command and Conquer game to go fully 3 dimensional, whereas all the games up to this one were 2D isometric. Not only this, but the premise of the game itself drew heavy criticism from Tiberium and Red Alert fans, as not only did Generals not look like a C&C game, it didn't feel like one either. The game follows a storyline that is much closer to real life than its predecessors. The silly, nonsensical attitude of the older games is gone. Generals is about two global superpowers (the US and China) and their attempted efforts to root out and destroy the Global Liberation Army: a terrorist organization backed by a huge but unknown network of funders. The GLA is a ruthless and violent faction. They bear the least sophisticated equipment in the game, and most of their vehicles and weapons are old, decrepit, and abandoned by the armies they used to serve. Because the GLA is badly suited for head on, one-on-one battles, they tend to favor sneaky and underhanded tactics such as stealth, fast speed, and hitting their opponents from where they're not expecting. As the USA and Chinese battle their way across central Asia and the Middle East, the GLA fights them all the way and always has more surprises ready for them. After seeing how close to real life Generals' story mode is, it's not really surprising that many people at the time didn't like the game. The game's plot hit a little too close to home for 2003, due to the then imminent war in Iraq, and the GLA bearing a strong resemblance to al-Qaeda. Due to its similarities to real life conflicts and terrorist groups, the game was banned in several countries, including germany. This doesn't detract from the huge amount of fun you will have playing it, however. As mentioned before, Generals has 3 teams vying for supremacy over the battlefields: the USA, China, and the GLA. Each team has different strategies and tactics that make them unique and more interesting to play as. Surprisingly, my favorite team is probably China as they get the heaviest, most powerful tanks and armored vehicles. The downside is that they're slow and expensive, but the costs can be made more reasonable by purchasing vehicles like gatling tanks, which easily shred hostile planes and helicopters. China also possesses the strongest artillery units in the game, namely, the nuke cannon, a huge but thinly armored field gun that lobs extremely powerful atomic shells over long ranges. China also makes extensive use of EMP technology, allowing them to call in planes to drop electromagnetic bombs anywhere in order to freeze entire vehicle formations in their tracks. The US team is arguably the strongest overall, and gets a lot of "click to destroy" abilities that can level an enemy base in seconds, such as the fuel air bomb, a-10 airstrike, and spectre gunship; a large plane that circles an area of the map and pummels everything below it with machine guns and explosive rounds. America also possesses lots of units that are as powerful as they are versatile. The humble Humvee is a weakly armored jeep mounted with a machine gun, but becomes one of the most unfair units in the game when loaded with a squad of missile soldiers. The Paladin is a robust heavy tank with substantial amounts of armor plating and even a laser that zaps enemy missiles out of existence. It should also go without saying that America also possesses the strongest air force in the game, with formidable Raptor jet fighters taking down enemy artillery units or hostile planes with ease. Lastly, we have the GLA, which is in many ways the most fun team to play as, and not only because they're the bad guys. The GLA team is designed with speed and aggression in mind, and are therefore stronger than the USA (and especially China) early in a match. GLA forces, being native to the deserts of the Middle East, do not require any type of electricity, unlike the other factions. As I said before, the downside to using the GLA is that they are underpowered. Their vehicles are very easy to kill if caught in the open, and a head on fight will almost always result in them being defeated. This means GLA commanders will have to rely on such technology as the GPS scrambler (which turns vehicles invisible) and tunnel networks in order to turn the tide of a fight. The team also has another big downside in the fact that they possess absolutely no air force, save for a large cargo plane that comes in to drop bombs loaded with dangerous illnesses (such as anthrax) on enemies. Lastly, I think I should comment on one of my favorite aspects about this game, which are the superweapons. Superweapons were featured in previous Command and Conquer games, but it wasn't until Generals when the concept really took off. You can build as many as you want, as long as you have enough electricity and money to do so. The superweapons for the 3 teams are the Particle Cannon, Scud Storm, and Nuclear Missile for USA, GLA, and China, respectively. The particle cannon is ironically the weakest, as it just fires a laser beam into space which bounces off an orbiting mirror and allows you to incinerate ground targets. I say it's the worst because the beam moves very slowly and doesn't do widespread area damage, the USA favoring precision weapons that minimize casualties. The nuclear missile is exactly what you would expect. It smashes down onto a target area, pieces of buildings and vehicles go flying everywhere, and it's just glorious destruction. It also leaves dangerous radiation at its explosion point for a while. The last (and probably best) superweapon is the GLA's scud storm, which launches a group of 9 anthrax-filled scud missiles wherever you want. The scud storm is the most overpowered superweapon because it hits the target multiple times, has a decent recharge timer (5 minutes), and leaves poisonous clouds of toxins on the target. I know this has been a really long review, but I could have gone on much longer. Generals means that much to me and to the world of strategy games. I know it wasn't really respected upon its release, so I hope that more people realize they made a really big mistake by passing it up, especially because the later C&C games are just pure garbage. I understand that this game is much different from the previous ones and takes a more realistic approach to things, but that is probably why it's my pick for my favorite game of all time. The only bad thing I can say about it is how the music is not as good as the previous games, mainly because Frank Klepacki (who did the soundtracks for the others) did not do the soundtrack for Generals.

While Generals may be my favorite game of all time, I am in the minority when I say I like it the best out of all the Command and Conquer games. Most people think that the games that preceded it were much better, as they had more interesting storylines and more creative units. Not to mention, Generals does not feature the full motion cutscenes this game is so well known for. The acting in them is cheesy and over the top most of the time, and you can tell the actors enjoyed what they were doing. This gives the game a fictitious feel to it, as it's not meant to be taken all that seriously. If you go into it expecting realism, you're going to be disappointed. Even so, the storyline of the game itself does mirror the real life cold war in many respects. Red Alert 2's plot is set after the events of the first Red Alert, in which the USSR tries to invade Europe in the 1950s but is beat back by an alliance of different countries called The Allies. The game still takes place in the alternate reality where Hitler is killed by Albert Einstein, thereby eliminating the second world war. Following the Soviet Union's defeat in the first game, they install a new leader, Alexander Romanov, who plans to invade America with the help of his psychic assistant, Yuri. The Soviets initiate the third world war by launching a surprise invasion of the US, with huge, bomb-laden blimps called Kirovs leading the way. America tries to respond by launching nukes, but Yuri is able to mind control the personnel responsible for the missile doors and lets them explode in their silos. The player is then given the choice to fight for either the Soviet Union or The Allies. Being a lifelong Generals player, I find the Soviets to be more fun because they get heavier tanks and their strategy revolves more around brute force, which makes them similar to the Chinese team from Generals. The Allies tend to rely more on combined arms, meaning their units have to work together in order to be successful. Regardless of which side you pick, you are given 12 campaign levels to complete. As The Allies, you must try and stop the USSR's onslaught, and once you're in a comfortable enough position, you actually start fighting back. As the Soviets, you're simply working on taking over the world (which makes this campaign more fun). I won't spoil either of the story modes, but RA2 also features other game modes to make things more interesting. Skirmish mode is back, which is good because it's a staple of the C&C series. You can play as different countries (which are aligned with either the USSR or Allies) and depending on which one you pick, you can get a country specific unit. For example, the German team gains access to a tank destroyer, which is an armored vehicle great at killing other vehicles but is pretty much worthless against anything else (even soldiers). Aside from this one unit, the German team plays identically to the standard Allies. One problem I do have with this game is the less than amazing balancing between the units, as many people in the game's community have stated time and again that the Soviets are overpowered. Early in a match, you can get completely overwhelmed by a Soviet player who knows what they're doing, as their vehicles tend to be stronger (but more expensive) and their infantry units are cheap and easy to mass produce. Once the Soviets have a Palace constructed, they can gain access to this building called the cloning vat, which means every soldier they produce has an identical copy of it made for free. Considering Soviet infantry are really cheap and train extremely quickly, they end up being very unfair in my opinion, as it's a viable strategy to build a huge army of soldiers and just support them with a few tanks. The Allies can beat back this tactic if they know their stuff, but considering their equipment is generally more expensive, it can be pretty frustrating. Aside from the balancing problems, Red Alert 2 has a huge amount of creative units and buildings in it, and even though I hate to say this, they're way more original than Generals. The Allies get some highly experimental units such as the Chrono Legionnaire; a soldier using a rifle derived from technology invented by Einstein which can freeze enemies and completely erase them from existence. On the other hand, the Soviets get things like the dreaded Apocalypse Tank, a monstrous, double barreled fighting vehicle that can go head on with basically any unit and come out on top. Similarly to Generals, this game does have superweapons, although sadly you can only build one at any time. By modern standards, the game does have something that is arguably irritating, which is its lack of a proper unit queue. In modern strategy games, you can queue up as many units as you want, but they will still be built one at a time. With this game, you can only produce one type of vehicle at a time, even if you have multiple war factories. However, building more than one war factory allows your vehicles to be made quicker, which is not the case in Generals. If you're used to old fashioned games like this, it won't really bother you, but if you're a modern RTS player, you may not like it. Add on to this the fact that this game crashes quite a lot on things other than Windows XP and it is hard to recommend it to people nowadays. If you're a Command and Conquer fan, you've probably already played this before (and you definitely love it). If you're not, it can be hard getting into now, but it's still easy to get into if you enjoy Generals like me, as there are numerous similarities. The 2 dimensional art style might seem outdated by today's standards, but the way a game looks doesn't really matter. The music is great too, and once again it's Frank Klepacki knowing just what tracks to compose. Whatever the case is, Red Alert 2, with all of its ridiculous acting, crazy and creative units, and interesting plot will always be regarded as a great game by RTS fans.

This game may be one of the best games ever made. It is very good. It is funny to play. The strategic parts are very good. Well, it is an old game but it is very good. The Full Motion Video is also very good. I usually play as G.D.I. If you like Command & Conquer games, play this one! It is better than Red Alert or Tiberian Sun.

It begins in Europe with the G.D.I., and in Africa with N.O.D. And multiplayer is also cool. Some times I play as the Brothership of Nod, and that's also fun. Great music, great graphics for the time, realistic and good storyline, nice acting... it is one of the best games ever made in. It is an old, cool, great, good, super game.