Suddenly, everything has gone more topsy-turvy than a drunken grizzly bear rolling down a Siberian hill. Suddenly, history’s new path distils before them like ice cold vodka no Einstein means no nukes and no nukes means that the Japanese war machine has expanded, unchecked for decades. The Russians however are surprised to see how the absence of Einstein has reshaped history when a Japanese invasion force starts pushing into their borders. Sure enough, the Allies are on the verge of defeat and only Great Britain (hey, that’s us!) stands between the Red Army and its total occupation of Europe.
Without Einstein, the world would never have discovered nuclear weaponry – and the Allies would never have been a threat to the Hammer and Sickles. Returning to the present, Curry and Krukov expect their present to be restored to a glorious, communist time.
Quickly, just as the Allies did in the Red Alert, the Soviets travel back in time and ready themselves to kill the man who was the biggest thorn in their sides. The time machine swings into view and a memory jingles, jangles and.um, jongles in the back of our minds. Down, down, down they go and it is slowly explained that though the Soviets are about to be crushed by the Allied forces, hope may not yet be lost. The story then starts from the Soviet perspective, with Tim Curry an officer in the army who hurriedly escorts General Krukov down into an over-elaborate, super-silly underground lab that’s been cunningly hidden behind a bookcase. The units, the characters, the maps, even the plot – they’ve all been crafted to re-ignite your love for Westwood. Thus the entire game, from the ground-up, is an attempt to fit as seamlessly as possible into the Red Alert franchise.
Much of the effort that Electronic Arts has put into the new game has been rightly focused on recapturing the nostalgia of those bygone days when full-motion video was the height of sophistication and nobody had ever thought of making a game with a totally mute character while still telling a decent story. That’s especially true for Red Alert 3 – the sequel to Red Alert, which was the first game I personally ever played on the PC back in the halcyon days when 256MB of RAM was more than enough.
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