Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3: Uprising First Look Preview

Here’s a random list of some things that we love: Time-travelling Russians; Transforming robots that turn into planes; Psychic schoolgirls who can make people burst; ex-Hollyoaks stars in skimpy costumes; Tim Curry’s bearded face. All of these things appeared in Red Alert 3, much to our eight-out-of-ten delight. It may have lacked innovation, but on every other front the game delivered a highly enjoyable buffet of RTS action, served with a side-salad of B-Movie silliness.

Historically, the Command & Conquer series has usually managed to deliver a pretty decent range of expansions to its main titles. With any luck this tradition will continue with Red Alert 3: Uprising, a stand-alone package (you won’t need C&C:RA3 to play it) that offers four campaigns, 11 additional units and a new game-mode known as Commander’s Challenge. We’re told that roughly half of the original cast will return for more gloriously cheesy-as-unwashed-feet cutscenes, and EA has revealed that they’ll be joined by bit-of-all right Holly Valance. Plot details are scarce at this point, but we do know that RA3’s Allied ending is being assumed as canon, and that the mysterious FutureTech corporation will play a larger role in proceedings this time.

All of which sounds quite interesting… but not half as interesting as the fact that the Empire of the Rising Sun are gaining a high-tier naval unit that CAN TURN INTO A GIANT FLYING ROBOT HEAD! Yes, indeed: it’s called the Giga-Fortress, and in its default mode it looks a bit like a lotus leaf – a big steel lotus leaf that can fire an enormous barrage of missiles. When deployed like this, the Giga-Fortress is slow-moving and has a rather limited field of vision; in its alternate mode, the unit becomes a hovering head that fires laser beams from its eyes. And while we’ve yet to try it out for ourselves, it looks like this attack will cut pretty much anything in half with a single, sweeping arc. As our demonstrator observes, the Giga-Fortress “will tear shit up”. Excellent!

While we didn’t see all the new units on our recent trip to EA’s Guildford HQ, we did get a glimpse of a few of them. Alongside the Giga-Fortress, the Empire also gains a new infantry fighter called the Archer Maiden, a trooper armed with an anti-air energy bow. Meanwhile, the Allied forces will be granted the use of the Pacifier – a high tier hover-tank equipped with twin Gatling guns (for mowing down soldiers) and a stationary artillery gun (for blowing up their houses). They’ll also be expanding their air force with the Harbinger – what looks to be a ridiculously large bomber. Meanwhile our beloved Ruskies will apparently get something called a Grinder Tank (this may just be a placeholder name). It doesn’t have any guns; it will chew-up anything that comes near it. Loyal Communists will also be pleased to see the return of the Desolator – an infantry specialist from RA2, who comes armed with a radiation-based weapon.

New toys are all very well and good, but the important thing is that you’ll have plenty of opportunity to use them. In addition to the three nation-specific campaigns (we’ll cover the fourth in a moment), you’ll also be able to test out your leadership skills in the Commander’s Challenge. The basic gist is that you have to fight your way through 50 specially-designed missions, starting out with access to only a handful of units and slowly increasing your options with each successive victory. You’ll be able to play as any of the main factions and you’ll get a degree of choice over the order in which you tackle the challenges, but the overall aim is to complete the entire shebang as quickly as you can. EA Los Angeles had one of their top players run through the missions, and if you manage to beat his overall par time, you’ll unlock some form of bonus… which is just as well, as we imagine this will be bloody hard to pull off.

Commander’s Challenge sounds like a pretty neat idea, but we’re equally if not more excited about the prospect of Uprising’s fourth campaign, which focuses entirely on Yuriko Omega, the psionic schoolgirl. If we were a bunch of pipe-smoking academics, we might describe this section as a bildungsroman, an account of how she developed her powers and discovered her true identity. Since we’re not, we’ll instead describe it as a set of three extended levels in which you’ll help Yuriko to escape from a high-security institution. The C&C series has always had commando-type missions that ignore base-building and leave you with a limited set of units, but this takes things to a new level: The game’s display is cleared of irrelevant menus, leaving you instead with a simple health indicator and four boxes which let you select Yuriko’s powers.

Initially her abilities will be quite weak, but over the course of the campaign she’ll swiftly transform into a terrifying mistress of Akira-like psychic death. Aside from her well-known ability to make people explode, Ms Omega will also gain the ability to possess other units, and send out a lethal death wave. She’ll also be able to pick up in-game objects and hurl them around with her mind – a skill which will show off this mode’s unique use of the Havoc engine. It looks like a cross between a basic dungeon crawler, a puzzle game, and all those J-horror films that cropped in the first half of this decade. And it looks like it’ll be a lot of fun, too.

Indeed, it looks like “a lot of fun” is a label that may be applied to the whole of RA3: Uprising. Select online retailers are listing the package with a pre-order price of £14.99, which seems like pretty good value given the amount of content on offer. These are the dark days of credit-crunch gaming, but the low cost of entry should ensure that lots of people take a gander. After all, what better way is there to beat off the recession blues than with a gigantic robotic head?

Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3: Uprising will be available for digital download on PC in March.