The PC can never truly be an isolated machine whose technology tethers its games to its platform. Genres often thought of as exclusive to it have been, with varying degrees of success, ported to entire generations of home consoles. Command and Conquer - Red Alert 3 is the latest title in the famed RTS genre to get an Xbox 360 makeover. The entire success of a Real Time Strategy game on the Xbox 360 hinges on how it uses the control pad. Seeing as this is EA’s third Command and Conquer game on the console, they’ve had plenty of time to refine the control schemes laid out by their previous titles, Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars and its expansion pack, Kane’s Wrath.
For the most part, they work well in directing the soft-core everyman strategy that the Command and Conquer games have become famous for. The left and right triggers deploy a series of buttons in a pop-up menu wheel, where you can select all the buildings and units for construction. It’s only on-screen for as long as you hold the triggers down, disappearing once the intended command has been set. This leaves the screen uncluttered of menu boxes, allowing you to get straight back into the action uninterrupted. It’s a very user-friendly and familiar scheme, a slightly redesigned version of the Command and Conquer 3 in-game selection menu, which doesn’t confuse regulars of or relative newcomers to the Xbox 360 RTS experience. The lack of complex commands, while disappointing to diehard fans, allows Red Alert 3 to focus on the series’ now-honed strength: combat.
Although they’re simplified for ease of use, the Xbox 360 controls don’t quite do justice to the genre Red Alert 3 champions on the console. There’s something inherently flawed with them, something that can’t quite be addressed with any update. It’s worth investigating this, for the sake of both the game and the entire RTS genre on Xbox 360. The small section of time it takes for the analogue stick to move from its furthermost point in tilt to its central point of origin on the controller lets it down when trying to provide a substitute for pinpoint screen-scrolling and unit selection with a PC’s mouse. That small amount of time, which often reveals itself as a tiny extra shift of movement in on-screen scroll, can make it difficult to select an important individual unit like Special Agent Tanya, amongst a crowd. Also, because the game’s level of zoom is insufficient to accurately pinpoint these particular units, getting them to act quickly in the middle of a heated firefight can often be hit and miss. The absence of these flaws might be taken for granted by PC-owning Command and Conquer fans, but if you’ve only played the series on Xbox 360, by lack of comparison they won’t be as noticeable. Thanks to a helpful tutorial, the controls are at least easy to get to grips with; you’ll learn to adapt to them quite quickly, provided you haven’t experienced the superior mouse control other PC RTS games can offer beforehand.
As mentioned earlier, Red Alert 3 is a soft-core Real Time Strategy, and it’s not just the controls that demonstrate this. The emphasis on no-nonsense combat pushes you to experience the thrills of battle. Resource gathering is downplayed in this game, a feature that it sees as merely delaying the inevitable combat. Instead of gathering ore from exhaustible seams like in previous Red Alert games, Red Alert 3 sees you using your harvester trucks to collect it from invincible ore nodes, which are dotted around each of the maps. The search for fresh supplies of ore is thus never an issue. The units themselves are also simplified. As with all Command and Conquer games, each one is the direct foil of another. This might streamline the gameplay and provide ample opportunities to counter the enemy’s forces, but it also limits the amount of experimental strategy that you can invent for yourself. Because the series is now famous for its tactics and unit categories, the strategy seems to already be thought out for you: you use anti-air vehicles to defeat helicopters, and snipers to defeat single special units. Gamers who have played previous Red Alert games will see few units that completely change the style of battle to gain victory. If nothing else, Red Alert 3, like its predecessors, voluntarily revokes the finer points of its established strategy by rewarding large-scale tank rushes. If nothing else, you can just build a load of these and flatten the enemy with sheer numbers.
