Whether you execute a daring Allied mission to rescue Einstein from Soviet clutches, or embark on a shocking and bloody purge of an Eastern European village as Stalin's most ruthless general, the opening missions of Red Alert are bold and immediate, grabbing a hunk of your shirt and yanking you into the action. What better way for Westwood, riding high on the success of their military RTS, to celebrate than with a game that lets you kick Stalin right in the moustache?Īnd Red Alert really does begin with a kick. The Soviet Union had collapsed only five years before, and both Cold War tensions and their end would have been fresh in the minds of the development team. Red Alert's conflict is based upon one that had already been resolved, albeit only recently. But in the absence of the Third Reich, the power of the Soviet Union grows unchecked, spreading through both Asia and Europe, while a ramshackle group of European Allies struggles to hold back the tide. Instead, Red Alert segues dramatically into an absurd alternate history, one where World War II never happened because Albert Einstein travelled back in time and erased Adolf Hitler from existence before the war broke out. But this wouldn't happen until 1999's Tiberian Sun. After the success of Command and Conquer, Westwood could easily have made a straightforward sequel, one that continued that story of GDI versus Nod. Red Alert's thematic choices are endlessly fascinating. But upon this skeleton, Red Alert builds an experience that's more frenetic and more imaginative, as well as being shamelessly ridiculous. Red Alert adopts C&C's skeleton wholesale, including the interstitial cutscenes and the open-ended campaign structure that often lets you choose from a selection of missions.
The game relies heavily on the RTS framework Westwood established with Dune 2 and mastered in Command & Conquer, that effervescent mix of resource-gathering, base-building and fast-paced battles. Naturally, it helps that the foundations of Red Alert were already laid at the outset of its production.
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