Red Alert

Surprisingly I only heard about this a month or so ago, and to be honest I was not too happy about it. I expected that EA would make a hash of it by trying to make a sequel to the best game of all time. However looking at the trailers and reading some beta reviews it may turn out to be surprisingly half decent.

The graphics look good, without being to busy or complicated and overwhelming, they have kept a lot of classic Red Alert 2 things around. Such as the voices and the music, which still sound as brilliant now as they did 8 years ago, the maps and terrain have the same sort of look to them, they are open and bright and seem somehow familiar.

There are two things I am slightly worried about. The inclusion of a third faction, C&C have done thisfor a while now and I don't think they have ever gotten it to work all that well, The Scrin were just annoying, although it did add an interesting aspect to the game play when you are fighting two different factions at once, Generals was too shit to play to see if 3 factions worked well however there is always the exception of Yuri's Revenge, which was just an expansion to Red Alert 2 so borrowed a lot from its greatness and slightly improved graphics. The second is the emphasis on the naval warfare, I am not a big fan of it really, but judging from the videos and the walkthough they may have done it properly and it may turn out to be amazing... I just hope they do not do the same thing as Age of Empires 3 and make the water so visually intensive that even on the lowest settings a decent PC could not run one of the levels because of the sheer amount of lag created. The release date is the end of October, by which point I shall have my new PC, so hopefully the water will not be an issue.

I am actually quite looking forward to it. And now back to waiting for spore to be released tomorrow.