Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 - Uprising
Psychic imbalance.
Nevertheless, all this is not enough to forgive the grind that's to come. Get stuck into the various campaigns and you'll fall rapidly into a save-point attrition of moderately frustrating progress. The levels are, it seems, either too difficult and therefore agonising to play, or incredibly easy and unsatisfying, with your super-units devastating the hapless AI. It's baffling: as if much of the game had been put together without any kind of testing or care. I can't believe that anyone played through some of these levels and thought "well that's great". Instead, they left me with the puzzling feeling that they were unfinished, or that they were deliberately out of whack.
Eugh, and that very first level is still with me. What were they thinking? Did they not bother to make sure it was playable and fun? Why didn't they just launch into a great big base-building brawl like we're used to? Why wasn't it even a good-looking first mission? Perhaps I'm over-reacting - after all, can one atrociously misjudged outing really ruin a game? Maybe not, but it certainly sets the tone. What's even more frustrating, however, are the handful of missions where you take control of Yuriko Omega, the psychic-arsenal schoolgirl, as she escapes from her captors and wreaks vengeance on the world. I'ts here that the game actually manages to entertain, even dazzle.
As the ferocious floating-girl of death you pick up tanks and hurl them around, blast dudes with a psychic bomb, take over the minds of ninjas and make them fight for you. Yuriko's sections in Uprising are something like a dungeon crawl, only heavy on the massive fireworks and mad carnage. It's actually quite fun just to destroy her surroundings, and it offers a look what Uprising might have been like if the game had been based purely around her exploits, rather than stumbling stupidly into the rote mission designs that make up the rest of it. Yuriko's exploding carnival of psionic death is a wonderful thing to experience, and I don't see any reason why some clever design and storytelling couldn't have made a full campaign of it: a kind of Dawn of War with angry schoolgirls.
This is where the sparkiest ideas and most entertaining visuals of Uprising are found, and it's fortunate that they made it the one part of the game that's playable without having to do that excruciating Russian mission. It at least makes you feel like you want to continue playing, and that the USD 20 isn't entirely wasted.
Nevertheless, Yuriko's heroic experiments in mass carnage do not entirely save this from being a rather underwhelming offering: she's just three large levels. The rest of the game might be dressed up in FMV spangles, but it's simply not produced to the high standards of the original game. There's skirmish aplenty, but no co-op, and in fact no new multiplayer offering whatsoever. I'm kind of okay with that, but I do hope that there's another downloadable expansion for Red Alert 3 that remembers why the co-op was so compelling - it might help to balance out some of the residual badness I'm feeling after sinking hours into Uprising.