Command & Conquer Red Alert 3
EA Los Angeles
Official Site
Standard Edition
C&C Red Alert 3 brings back the fan-favorite real-time strategy game in its latest incarnation with new features, powers, technologies, and a different world.
Studio
EA Los Angeles
Genre
Strategy
Platforms
Mac
,
PC
,
PlayStation 3
,
Xbox 360
Release Date
2008-10-30
Buy Now on Origin
Command & Conquer Red Alert 3
PlayStation 3
Buy Now on PlayStation
Command & Conquer Red Alert 3
Xbox 360
Buy Now on Xbox
Game Features
Ready your Man Cannons! — Armored War Bears, and Anime-inspired psychic school girls join your favorite Red Alert units like Sonic Dolphins, Tesla Troopers, Attack Dogs, and the ever popular Tanya.
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Cooperative Mode Lets You Team Up with Your Friends: Red Alert 3 has a fully co-operative campaign mode where you and a friend can play together to achieve victory.
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Play Against Your Friends in Multiplayer: With the different units and play mechanics of each faction, you and your friends will have a great time playing against each other, perfecting different strategies to best suit the u…
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Fight on Land, in the Air, and on Sea: Red Alert 3 has land units, air units, and naval units, all integral parts of the game. Unlike most strategy games that don’t bother with naval warfare, Red Alert 3 makes controlling the…
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Star-Studded Storytelling — Command & Conquer’s trademark live-action videos return in HD, with over 60 minutes of footage featuring the largest cast in the history of the Command & Conquer franchise.
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Play As Three Different Factions: In Red Alert 3, you have the choice to play as the Allies, the Soviets, or the Empire of the Rising Sun. Each faction has its own story-line and distinct units with advantages and disadvantag…
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Screenshots
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command-and-conquer-red-alert-3 Screenshot
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command-and-conquer-red-alert-3 Screenshot
command-and-conquer-red-alert-3 Screenshot
command-and-conquer-red-alert-3 Screenshot
command-and-conquer-red-alert-3 Screenshot
command-and-conquer-red-alert-3 Screenshot
command-and-conquer-red-alert-3 Screenshot
Related Games
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Command & Conquer™ Remastered Collection
Official Site
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Command & Conquer: Rivals
Official Site
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Command & Conquer Tiberium Alliances
Related Add-Ons
Official Site
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Command & Conquer Red Alert 3: Uprising
Official Site
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Command & Conquer 3: Kane’s Wrath
Official Site
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Command and Conquer Generals Zero Hour
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News
Rivals Exist?!!?! — FRAGS OF WAR
Jun 11
5 Reasons Why EA Isn’t Making a New Command & Conquer RTS.
Why The Hell Does C&C: Rivals Exist?!!?!
frags
Opinion
UPDATE: EA has announced that they will be working together with Petroglyph to do a remaster of Command & Conquer and Red Alert. Please note that I do not consider remasters to be new games. It’s nice but it’s not a new Command & Conquer. You can read more about the remaster here.
There it was. Shown on stage, taunting the fans of this RTS classic. EA announced Command & Conquer: Rivals for the mobile platform at E3 2018 and that didn’t go down well. Many questioned EA’s move to make it a mobile game. I have a pretty good idea why they did it.
There’s no doubt EA’s E3 2018 presentation’s biggest what the f*** were you thinking moment was the announcement of Command & Conquer: Rivals.
And the manner in which it was announced. The way it was mysteriously brought on stage and teased. And the absolute horror of realising what it was afterwards.
As much as I’d like to think they are doing this just to spite us all, there are reasons for EA’s aversion to a proper RTS sequel.
Some might be valid reasons and others, frankly were EA’s own doing.
So here are the 5 reasons why I believe EA isn’t making a proper Command & Conquer RTS sequel for the PC.
Remember Command & Conquer 4: Tiberium Twilight? You probably might have erased that one off from memory.
What would be the best way to move forward from Command & Conquer 3, which was a return to the series classic roots of fast-paced RTS gameplay?
To totally throw what they had, out of the window and completely rework the formula of a Command & Conquer RTS.
C&C 3 had base building. C&C 4 threw that out for one single mobile base. C&C 3 allowed you to amass large armies to assault the enemy base.
Whose idea was it to include an XP system that required you to grind through the game to unlock new units!
C&C 4 was an assault on our intelligence. It had smaller army sizes for what they claim to be more tactical battles.
Whose idea was it to include an XP system that required you to grind through the game to unlock new units!
The «large» armies clashing in Command & Conquer 4.
Okay, I’ve made my point, it was trash. It was NOT Command & Conquer. The fans and the PC gaming audience spoke loud and clear with their wallets.
It might have sold quite well in the first week. But as word got out that it was rubbish, the sales slowed down dramatically. Boxes of unsold units stacked high at retail stores.
This is somewhat related to point #1 especially for Command & Conquer 4. But the rot began even earlier than that. Even the Red Alert franchise was not spared from EA’s game-changing alterations.
Look at how popular and successful StarCraft is. Let’s copy that and maybe we’d get huge loads of money
I can only imagine the boardroom meeting where the design of the game was discussed.
«Look at how popular and successful StarCraft is. Let’s copy that and maybe we’d get huge loads of money».
So instead of improving upon the previous game, they added special abilities that required a high-degree of micro action and 3 distinct factions.
Red Alert 3 was very… very silly. Giant mecha robots? Phssssh.
Apart from affecting sales, the bigger impact of poor reviews for Command & Conquer 4 and Red Alert 3 was the fans’ fallout of trust and confidence in the studio.
It also had a huge effect on the morale of those people that worked on the Command & Conquer games. I don’t doubt one bit, a lot of people worked very hard to get those games out the door.
It’s a shame that the hardworking men and women at EA, the designers, the programmers, the artists, were let down by the decisions made higher up at EA.
Lead designer, systems designer, AI designer, level designer, artists, programmers, sound engineers, 3D designers, testers, tea lady, janitor.
I probably left out 10 other positions, or even more.
Developing a PC game, a strategy game at that is a complex affair. You’re going to need lots of expertise to competently put together the various systems and elements of the game together.
This basically means maintaining a strategy game studio was going to be a sizable investment for EA as opposed to running a mobile game development team of five people or so.
I don’t exactly know how many people were involved in the development of Command & Conquer: Rivals, but I can bet it’s smaller than the teams that did the Command & Conquer RTS.
Add to that slowing sales for their PC RTS games, you can see why they’ve had a problem with this. EA simply had no idea how to reverse this. Unlike Blizzard, EA simply doesn’t have the goodwill of the fans to stay loyal to their games.
Speaking of high development costs, this leads to my next point.
What happens to a studio that has a long tradition of developing strategy games when it gets shut down? Their employees are unlikely to stay on with the parent company.
They get absorbed by other development studios and are a loss to EA who now lack the people with the know-how on developing great strategy games.
Spore was the beginning of the downfall for Maxis Entertainment. Probably deserves a whole article by itself.
Maxis, Waystone Games, DreamWorks Interactive, Mythic Entertainment, Bullfrog, and the studio that created the franchise itself, Westwood Studios. These are only a few of the studios that EA shut-down.
It sends a message that EA really doesn’t care about the strategy game genre
It sends a message that EA really doesn’t care about the strategy game genre. The last EA strategy game I played was the new (and last) SimCity that released in 2013. The less said about that one, the better.
Industry experts estimate that mobile gaming revenues would increase to USD$70.
3 billion in 2018, making it the largest gaming segment. It’s larger than PC gaming and Console gaming combined!
Read that again, mobile gaming is the largest gaming segment from a revenue perspective. It’s had a 10-year double-digit growth.
The strategy game genre is a very large part of mobile gaming. It’s not unthinkable that strategy game studios or publishers might consider entering the mobile gaming market.
But the downside to it is that games on mobile have to be designed for mobile. This goes beyond UI. Mechanics have to be chopped. Systems have to be simplified to cater to the shorter burst of gameplay activity of mobile gamers.
So getting back to that awful Command & Conquer: Rivals reveal at E3 2018. Despite the negativity to that moment, and to the game itself, it will likely not have any effect.
The thing about mobile games is that reviews don’t impact profitability that much. The audience that plays them isn’t influenced by what is written about the games.
In fact, they probably aren’t even Command & Conquer fans. It was completely unnecessary for EA to reveal Command & Conquer: Rivals on stage at E3 2018.
I speculated that the reveal was simply EA filling in time. EA’s presentation this year was very thin and lacking in games. Looking at how little was said about the game, it was probably put together at the last minute.
So what did you think about the reveal and the fate of the Command & Conquer series? Tell me in the comments. I did a video many months back about dead franchises where I touched on Command & Conquer. Check out my video below.
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Complete list of Command & Conquer games in order ( chronology) with reviews and ratings of players.
Reviews and reviews, screenshots and videos, guides and tips for all major games in the Command & Conquer series.
The best and worst games, sequels, prequels and spin-offs on
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All about the Command & Conquer game series.
list of all games in order
We decided to tell you about one of the iconic franchises in the history of the RTS genre, namely the Command & Conquer series.
It is noteworthy that already in the first years of the existence of the series, it managed to split into two major storylines, one of which (Tiberium) tells about the battles for control over the valuable resource tiberium in a plus or minus modern setting, and the second (Red Alert) is devoted to an alternative a universe in which, thanks to Albert Einstein, World War II was prevented, and tiberium has not yet been discovered. Therefore, our list is divided into several parts, in each of which the games are sorted chronologically.
Chronology of the release of games in the series on the PC.
Tiberium Universe
The events of these games unfold in an alternative present, where the alien mineral tiberium is rapidly becoming the basis of the world’s energy and the planet’s most valuable resource. A mysterious sect called the Brotherhood of Nod and its charismatic leader Kane quickly realize the potential of the Tiberium business and gradually take control of it.
Nod’s «diplomacy» tool is gradually becoming terrorist attacks, so the UN Security Council finally decides to act and creates an international coalition of GDI (Global Defense Initiative). It is the confrontation of these two factions for control of tiberium that all the games of this sub-franchise are devoted to.
Command & Conquer (1995)
Released in 1992, Dune II not only defined the general outlines of RTS as a genre for many years to come, but also showed Westwood Studios that strategies can make good money.
Looking at the estimate of «Dune» and seeing the column «royalties» there, the developers became thoughtful — do they really need the setting of Herbert’s novels?
The answer was a story concept developed by the studio about the confrontation between the good guys from the UN and the bad religious fanatics. Otherwise, Command & Conquer strongly resembled Dune II — only instead of spice there was tiberium, energy was produced by familiar generators, and not «wind traps», and instead of distant and deserted Arrakis — our beautiful Earth.
Long before the release of Starcraft, C&C used asymmetric unit design — regular GDI troops relied mainly on armor and firepower, and Nodovtsy relied on the speed and cheapness of the units produced.
Original gameplay, captivating and topical story, charismatic villain Kane and cool multiplayer quickly made the game a bestseller — in 2 years it sold over 3 million copies. Critics voted C&C one of the best strategy games of the year with an average rating of 9out of 10 points. Since 2007, the game has been distributed free of charge.
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Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun (1999)
Kane, who was killed in the first part, is resurrected, and the confrontation between the two factions flares up with renewed vigor. At the same time, the style of the game changes noticeably — if the first part is more like a typical war of the nineties with a couple of fantastic «tiberium units», then in the sequel everything becomes much more futuristic — the parties to the conflict are using lasers, cyborgs, anti-gravity and other high-tech things with might and main.
Critics greeted the triquel even more favorably than the sequel, and the average rating was 8.5 out of 10. The third part boasted excellent graphics and dynamic gameplay. Multiplayer has collected the best of the past parts, and also brought a lot of new things. This aspect of EALA was given a lot of attention, trying to make C&C an esports discipline.
At the same time, the developers took the lore of the game very freely, practically ignoring the events of the second part. The single player campaign, storyline, and cutscenes between missions couldn’t beat C&C2: Tiberain Sun.
Released in 2009, the Kane’s Wrath add-on added sub-factions and a new multiplayer mode, but in general it was noticeably inferior in quality to the original game, for which it received an average rating of 7.5/10 points from critics.
Buy C&C 3: Tiberium Wars
Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight (2010)
The fourth part put an end to the story of Kane and the Tiberium Wars on PC. The game received the lowest average critic score of 6.5/10 in the history of the franchise, and has a user rating of 17/100 on Steam.
The fourth part does not have anything from Command & Conquer: there is no base building, resource gathering, interesting history and other familiar attributes of the series. This is not surprising: the project was originally developed as a network version of C&C3 with point capture mode.
The game was to be launched in Asian markets. At some point, the company’s management decided that from a business point of view, it makes sense to add a single player campaign, put the name «C & C4» and send it to stores in this form. Developers from EALA had no choice but to obey this decision.
The plot of the campaigns for both sides leads to approximately the same ending. Kane SUDDENLY turns out to be a real (?) prophet and not a human at all (?) (which, as if in hindsight, justifies all the terrorism and lewdness committed by Nod fans). The graphics have not changed much compared to the third part, and in some places even began to look worse. Units of different factions became similar to each other. Finally, the classic gameplay with the extraction of tiberium gave way to the capture of key points, which was fashionable in those years, which deprived the game of its corporate identity.
Its sales did not please the publisher either, so the quad managed to become not only the last in the sub-series, but also the first part for which no add-on was released.
Buy C&C 4: Tiberian Twilight
Red Alert Sub-series
This sub-series was originally conceived as a prequel to the original Command & Conquer, but quickly grew into a stand-alone phenomenon. The history of both sub-franchises developed in parallel for a long time and the best finds of one of them were quickly transferred to the other.
The events of the «Red Threat», as we wrote above, unfold in an alternative universe where Hitler was killed before he came to power. The result was a little different from what was planned — the war began anyway, only instead of Hitler it was unleashed by Stalin.
Command & Conquer: Red Alert (1996)
The game starts in the alternate forties. Having chosen one of the parties (Alliance of Western countries or the USSR), we have to try to lead them to victory.
As in the original C&C, the units of both sides are asymmetric (the USSR has more protected and painful hitters, the Alliance has cheaper and faster ones). Different types of troops deal different types of damage and are only effective against certain opponents, which forces you to either combine troops and keep an eye on the balance, or score on everything and rivet tanks for a rush (a very effective tactic, especially for councils).
The Red Menace has sold over a million copies and received critical acclaim with an average score of around 9/10. Such results led to the emergence of a separate sub-franchise — after all, the studio saw that the war between the USSR and the Alliance was interesting to gamers just like the confrontation between Nod and GDI.
Like the first C&C, Red Alert 1 with add-ons can now be downloaded for free.
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Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 (2000)
The victory of the Alliance has led to a new round of confrontation. The head of the USSR, Romanov, with the help of his telepathic assistant Yuri, gathers forces and strikes at the Alliance.
The battle has shifted to famous American cities, and a variety of land, sea and air forces have been added to the arsenals of both sides. What are the Kirov airships, the weather control system, psychotronic troops, trained dolphins, Mirage tanks and much more.
Multiplayer has significantly increased its dynamics, new modes have appeared. An important gameplay change was the presence of oil rigs and neutral technical buildings on the map. Another significant innovation: the ability to place infantry in buildings on city maps, which significantly increased their survivability. In multiplayer, there are 5 countries of the Western bloc and 4 of the Socialist, each of which has its own unique units.
The second part of Red Alert performed well in stores. Critics gave the game an average score of 8.5 out of 10. Separately, the authors of most reviews praised the character Yuri, who turned out to be almost as cool as Kane from the original series. Released the following year, the add-on turned out to be the largest in the history of the series, adding a new side — Yuri.
buy red alert 2
Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 (2008)
Having lost the war, the USSR made a knight’s move, sending its agent to the past, where he kills Einstein shortly after the assassination of Hitler. As a result, the power of the Alliance falls and the USSR easily captures almost all of Europe. Meanwhile, in the East, Japan is gaining strength and suddenly attacks the USSR.
This is how the third faction appears in the franchise — the Empire of the Rising Sun.
The units of the old factions are mostly preserved (except that the USSR got war bears and new aircraft), but Japan boasts eclectic troops like samurai with energy katanas, psionic schoolgirls and flying submarines.
Triquel received moderately good reviews from critics (7.5 out of 10), and the opinion of fans of the series was divided: some liked Red Alert 3, while others scolded the game for its cartoony visual style and attempts to copy Starcraft in multiplayer. The addon Uprising, released a year later, was remembered only for the reckless campaign for the psionic girl Yuriko.
Buy Red Alert 3
Universe Generals
C&C Generals (2003)
This RTS is dedicated to the confrontation between the modern USA, China and the terrorist organization Global Liberation Army.
She has nothing to do with the C&C series in terms of plot.
The first 3D C&C on PC didn’t blindly copy the gameplay of the previous installments, offering a new gameplay that proved extremely viable, especially in multiplayer. Released a year later, the add-on Zero Hour consolidated the success of the original game by adding the Generals Challange mode to the game — “duels” with 9generals, each with their own fighting style.
The Generals sold fairly well and received an average score of 8.5 out of 10 from critics.
C&C Renegade (2002)
If Blizzard only dreams of making a shooter based on their Starcraft strategy series (and constantly cancels it in the middle of development), then the guys from Westwood managed to make a shooter out of their RTS back in 2002.
Renegade takes place during the First Tiberium War (that is, parallel to the events of the very first Command & Conquer). The main character is a GDI commando named Nick Parker, who will have to fight against the elite troops of Nod and make a significant contribution to the victory. The game has a wide arsenal of weapons and vehicles, as well as the ability to target enemy bases with nuclear missiles and ion cannons in some missions.
«The Renegade» received an average rating of 7.5 out of 10 from critics and sold over 250,000 copies. One of the features of the game was the unique multiplayer mode with bases, which gained a lot of popularity and was noted by game designer Cliff Bleszinski as being ahead of its time.
Command & Conquer: Tiberium Alliances (2012)
The epic story of the Tiberium Wars for some reason continued not only without Kane, but also in the form of a browser.
The Forgotten steal Tacitus (a mega-artifact from the previous parts) from the GDI base, forcing Nod to team up with old enemies to save the Earth from the power of the Tiberium mutants.
The gameplay is a variation on the theme of Traviano-like games — each gamer gets a base at the edge of the world and must help his alliance capture the center of the global map.
It must be admitted that, as for a browser, the project turned out to be very even nothing and fully deserved its marks at the level of 8/10. It’s just that the browser format itself is a bit different from what the iconic RTS franchise deserves.
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C&C Rivals (2018)
As with Tiberium Alliances, the game itself may have turned out well, but its format is clearly not what fans of the series were expecting.
Instead of another numbered part of any of the sub-franchises on PC, gamers got a mobile strategy, albeit a good one, with all the accompanying limitations, such as greatly simplified gameplay and a primitive plot.
You can play as Nod and GDI, and the essence of online zarub comes down to capturing and holding platforms around the missile silo.
Download on Google PlayDownload on the App Store
What’s next?
After the release of Tiberian Twilight, most of the development team left EA Los Angeles. Announced in 2011, the sequel, originally to be called Generals 2 and then simply Command & Conquer, was canceled in 2013 after open testing. Since then, representatives of Electronic Arts have not reported any plans to release a full-fledged continuation of the series.
Released in 2018, Rivals may have revived interest in the franchise, but still could not replace a full-fledged game on PC and received its portion of criticism from loyal fans.
In response, in November 2018, EA representatives announced a global remastering of the series for modern PCs, starting with the first parts — C&C and Red Alert. The project was taken up by the Petroglyph Games studio, which was founded by former employees of Westwood, and its release took place on June 5, 2020.
The developers have made a lot of changes to the remaster, ranging from updating the picture and ending with improvements in the interface and online play, without touching the gameplay. Players have been able to mod and play on large 4K displays, but the fact that this is still a remaster and not a remake added a nasty flavor to fan expectations.
