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Better than Age of Empires and Tiberian Sun combined!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 21 / 23
Date: March 26, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Command & Conquer: Red Alert is the best strategy game out there. Use tanks, infantry, Tesla Coils, planes, subs, and more to blow the computer apart, or take on a friend (or seven) in multiplayer Head-To-Head (to head-to-head...) Play as the Soviets and crush the Allies. Or be the Allies and save the world from the Soviets. Make sure you have enough power to keep your important buildings (such as radar and SAM sites) in case of a surprise attack. There are three things you need to do: 1) Make sure you have food close by; you don't want things like hunger distacting you. 2) Make all your phone calls NOW; you will be using the modem so much you can't call them. 3)BUY THE GAME!

Your entry into the world of Real Time Strategy

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 11 / 12
Date: April 29, 2001
Author: Amazon User

This isn't the first, or latest or even the best Real Time Strategy game ever made, but it's perhaps the best first game for those new to the genre. In RTS, you build up both an army and the industrial base with which to create the army. There is some valuable resource (here, the famed "Tiberium") which fuels your war mchine and that of your opponent. The inherent unrealism of RTS - you build the base and the army not only in real time, but in a rather short amount of it - is more than compensated by the tenacity and resourcefulness of your enemy, the obstacles you face and the myriad strategies you must quickly use to overcome both. "Red Alert" is actually a prequel to "Command and Concquer" which pit the noble - if militaristic - Global Defense Initiative against the insidious cultish Brotherhood of Nod. In RA, we find the younger GDI facing a massive war machine fielded by Josef Stalin's USSR. How did that happen? What about WWII? Never took place - Hitler was some out of work painter and Austrian army vet when he died under mysterious circumstances after a 1924 meeting with somebody named Einstein. Now the Soviets and the GDI fight using weapons that vary between conventional and (by our standards) exotic.

In addition to your tanks, planes and ships, you must also contend with Tesla Coils (artificial lighting generators), chronospheres (remember the "Philadelphia Experiment"?) and the "Iron Curtain". You get to play each side, and must deal with each one's respective weakenesses - the allies are better represented on sea where their cruisers and gunboats annhilate russian subs; Russian MiG's, however, dominate the sky). Anybody whose RTS experience goes no further than "Dune II" (1992) best be warned - this is more than about tank-rushing. simply cranking out a dozen or so of your heaviest and most fearsome mechanized armored assets and sending them headlong at your enemy's weakest point is not the single strategy. As an exmple - one mission may have you decimate the GDI base on the other side of the river. However, there are no bridges (at least none that last very long). So you've got to build marine transports to carry your army across - but that requires a subpen. To protect your subpen (which is built on the water) and the transports when they're built, you'll need to crank out subs (which are inferior to the enemy's surface fleet, but remain the only real option). Also, your transports can only load and offload their cargoes on sandy stretches of shoreline - and the only non-rocky coastline just happens to be occupied by the enemy. The allies may also have spies - who can walk past tanls and soldiers without being spotted (only your canine units know when they're around), and the feared "Tanya", a sexy "Rambette" who can pick off scores of infantry like pigeons and responds with the appropriate "Ka-chinG!!!" with every kill. Red Alert is incredibly challenging, not infrequently frustrating and quite addictive. An extensive internet community exists for those with questions or those hungering for new missions. I ran the game on my P-166MMX with no problems. Those with more powerful systems may want to consider "Red Alert-2", but they'd be missing an excellent intro to the genre.

superior by far

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 15 / 21
Date: April 12, 2000
Author: Amazon User

i got this game, oh i dont know, 3 years ago, and could not wait for the release of Tiberium sun, but what i found was just a souless shell of a game.

The original red alert was balanced but still diverce. Foucused on planing, strategy, and cunning. Balanced gameplay is the key. whereas the new tiberium sun may look pretty, the game is just the same rehashed harvest, build, rush, brining nothing new to the genre.

i love Red alert, my first foree into the multiplayer world, everyday after school, i would play modem games. who knows how many hours i logged playing it. Buy Red alert, a great great game. Whereas Tiberium sun is not worth the time of day, it is pretty, and thats about it. There are no downsides to anything, every unit is too good for its own good. NO balance, no gameplay, no fun.

Westwood, hoping to cash in on the RTS gravy train pumped out its newest contender, tiberium sun, without putting any soul behind it. Buy red alert, or total annihilation or homeworld, games that truly revolutionized the RTS world and will give you a worthwhile time that would warrent you shelling out your cash for.

Don't buy this package....

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 9 / 11
Date: March 31, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Red alert is a great game and certainly worth buying but you can pick it up in a variety of packages and prices here on amazon and this one is NOT the most economical. I'll explain later.

Now to the game. Yes red alert is now an old game by PC standards. The graphics are still ok but not obviously up to snuff compared to tiberian sun or it's sequal red alert 2. Never the less red alert is a blast and might still be the most enjoyable, playable game in the whole command and conquer seris including those newer games. Anybody familiar with any one CnC game basically knows how to play them all because the concept is the same. You need two resources to function. The most important resource is had by making refineries and sending out harvesters to gather it. In this game it is called ore, in tiberian sun it is called tiberian but it all doesn't matter because the entire game is focused on getting as many harvesters at work as possible and protecting them so you have the credits neccesary to build your military. From an offensive perspective of course you want to try and cut off your opponents harvesters and that's at least half the game. The other resource is power which is easily had by building power plants from time to time.

The game features two very evenly matched sides in a mostly conventional military battle. The russians and the ukrainians on one side and the allies on the other with germany, france and england. The russians and the ukrainians have the bigger more powerful tanks, a heavy tank and the mammoth. The allies have tanks that are smaller quicker and cheaper. The russians can make deadly telsa coils for defense which electrocute the enemy while the ally countries can make cheaper better armoured conventional turrets and pill boxes. The russians can make a substantial air attack with fast flying mig bombers and yaks. The allies are limited to helecopters but can make a real navy with destroyers and crusiers while the other side can only make defensive submarines. The sides are balanced and which country you choose to play with will be determined by the map. If the map has lot's of water on it you may prefer to be one of the ally countries so you can build a navy.

Overall the action is constant and the battles can be intense. One of the things that sets this game and all the CnC games apart from other rts games is that these games are much more base camp limited. In this game you have a command center and you build around it. You can make a sevice depot and then make an mcv but you still have to place it down some place and build around it. Those who are more used to games like total annililation or age of empires may find this confining. In those games you have mobile units that allow you to build anything anywhere on the map irregardless of how close or far they may be from another structure or unit. Here you have to build within the camp and while you can make mcv's and build other camps they are not easy to protect and mcv's are expensive. Normally in the course of a game you may have your major camp and one smaller additional one whose purpose is to protect you harvesters as they have to go out further and further for ore.

Overall red alert is a very fun well balanced game that still has many followers today. Go on mplayer or westwood and you will find dozens even hundreds of players. There are dozens of good downloads available online including mega maps and desktop theme packs. I highly recommend the coop maps which allow you and a bud to ally and take on a super charged AI opponent. With coop you can really play as a single team where each player can control the others units and the maps are great.

Finally, don't buy this game package. You can buy just red alert for $ so why pay more for this? Also red alert is now available in a couple of nice game packages. You can buy red alert and gettysburg along with another rts game in one package and another package allows you to buy 10 games including this one.

World War 2 Just Changed...

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: June 14, 2000
Author: Amazon User

In C&C: Red Alert (in case you don't already know) you fight an alternate World War 2, in which Germany, Britain, Greece and all the other Western European countries fight against the might of the Soviet Union. The game is a classic, and the scientific details are well thought out. (Tesla now devotes his time to weapons research for the Soviets, while Einstein is the key to a secret Allied weapon) Buy the game - you won't regret it.

Ah, A classic game.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: September 18, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Red Alert Is a very good games, while the graphics may not be so good, but hey, its a old game.
Red Alert Is a very good RTS, where you build buildings for more units, war factories, yaks, Cruisers, Mammoth tanks, Light tanks, Helipad.... Very kool. In the game you collect ore by using ore miners, ore is your money. The more you collect and have, the better you can afford to build buildings and units. There is a good variety of units, yup. The gameplay is very fast, and exciting.. You have to use strategies. You can play the game on Westwood online with real people, though in online games its very vulnerable to fall by people "rushing" you with tanks. The story is interesting, though the mission briefings the actors and script is a little funny, cheesy. And the gameplay is not as balanced as other games, and it has its own small faults like every game does. So, I rate it 4 stars

2nd Installment Is Amazing

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: August 10, 2001
Author: Amazon User

A truly quality game, RA has survived for years because of its gameplay and resale value. The second in the CNC series, it provides some WWII mayhem with a twist. That twisted NOD dog Kane has gone back in time, and from the opening screens you know you will be in your seat for a long time. It offers a skirmish mode, which the first one didn't, along with a map editor and two vastly divergent campaigns, Soviet or Allied. The cutscenes are of remarkable quality (the Stalin actor is dead-on). The story goes: Einstein's time research has led to the development of a time machine. He goes back in time and kills Hitler, but makes history worse, as Stalin and the Red Army now want their breathing room. A momentous game that spawned an entire genre of copycats, this game holds up still, and now it is being packaged with RA2, also a very fun game. Just get this game, it is great.

This game rocks!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: November 18, 1999
Author: Amazon User

What else is there to say? This is the best war strategy game I've ever played! The graphics are good, especially the cut scenes, and the amount of things you can build, train and destroy are numerous! Also, the Tanya character is the best! Fun, challenging and cool, I urge you to buy this game!

Very cool!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 3
Date: February 13, 2001
Author: Amazon User

I bought this as part of package deal that had Red Alert & both upgrades and man, what a deal. This is a very cool game with some great gameplya, battles, on cut scenes that wer just too cool. The only thing bad about this game was the multiplay. Seemed like the Russians had too much of an advantage. you always had to over for paratroopers dropping behind your lines, otherwise you lost something critical plus the Russians got to make bombs which caused alot of damage. I played a freind of mine and beat him 8 straight times before he wouldn't play me anymore. That was the first time I ever played the game and I was always the Russians. Other than that, this was too cool. you get to play both sides and alot of the levels are very challenging. A must for any Command & Conquer fan and realtime game lovers.

Waaaaaaaay better than that new Tiberian sun trash

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: November 24, 1999
Author: Amazon User

Well, I loved C&C I, but I almost literally worshipped Westwood for Red alert, man this games rocks! This game makes a worthy heir to the first game and contributes a lot of great new ideas such as warships,amphibious landingcraft, and so on. Take my advise, if you're thinking of buying a C&C, take either this one or C&C I. STAY AWAY from that new junk they just released, Tiberian Sun, although it looks a lot better, it's a laugh compared to the two originals.

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