if you miss the classics

Games like Red Alert

Red Alert is not just “Command & Conquer with different sprites”, and people who want Red Alert specifically usually want a tone as much as a mechanic.

People who say “games like Command & Conquer” and people who say “games like Red Alert” usually want two slightly different things. The first want the loop. The second want the loop and the tone: an alternate 1946 in which Einstein has removed Hitler from history, Tesla built a coil that vaporises infantry, and everyone involved is playing it completely straight while a soundtrack called Hell March runs underneath.

That combination of a rigorous economic simulation and total nonsense on top is genuinely rare, and it is most of why the game is still remembered.

Red Alert itself

Command & Conquer Remastered Collection

Contains Red Alert with Counterstrike and The Aftermath, remastered art with a live toggle back to the originals, the rescanned FMV, and Frank Klepacki’s soundtrack re-recorded. The most straightforward way to play the original as an adult with a working machine.

Red Alert 2 and Yuri’s Revenge, via CnCNet

RA2 is not in the remaster — it is in the older Ultimate Collection — but the community has been maintaining it for a very long time. CnCNet provides the patches that make it behave on current hardware and keeps online multiplayer alive. For a lot of people RA2 is the one, and it remains playable.

OpenRA’s Red Alert mod

Free, open source, cross-platform, and the version to play if you care more about it being good than about it being identical. Modern selection, attack-move, sane build queues and working multiplayer. It rebalances as it goes, so it is a different competitive game from the 1996 one.

Modern games that hit the same nerve

• Tempest Rising — the closest new game to the Westwood formula, tonally nearer Tiberian Sun than Red Alert, but built on the same bones.
• 8-Bit Armies / 8-Bit Hordes — Petroglyph, staffed with ex-Westwood people, doing a bright and deliberately uncomplicated version of this loop. Cheap, co-op, and the closest thing to a comfort-food C&C.
• Company of Heroes 3 — not a base-builder, but if what you loved was combined arms and infantry that behaves like infantry, it is the best in class.
• World in Conflict — old now, and it removed base-building entirely, but it is the best Cold-War-gone-hot fantasy ever put in an RTS.
• Mental Omega — a very large, very ambitious free mod for Yuri’s Revenge, with a full original campaign. If you want more Red Alert 2 more than you want a new game, that is what it is for.

What TANKS takes from it

Two things, and it is open about both. The tesla coil — expensive, enormously power-hungry, kills nearly anything in two bolts, and goes stone dead the instant your power supply drops below your draw, which makes it the most interesting defence in the game to attack. And the mammoth tank, at the top of the tech tree, slow enough that arriving late with one is a worse plan than arriving on time with three light tanks.

Two of the twelve campaign missions are built entirely on the coil’s weakness. Mission eleven is a rocket works ringed with thirty of them, run by eight uprated power plants on a farm to the north-west — and somewhere around the sixth plant you take down, all thirty go out at once.

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