Command and Conquer and Red Alert return in one great value collection.
Command and Conquer was everything in the ’90s. In this extremely influential real-time strategy series, you’d build a base, gather resources, raise an army and send them to battle, hoping like hell that the enemy had a slightly less powerful force than yours.
In its second entry, Red Alert, the series’ formula crystallized, and the goofy story went into alternate history: the game starts with Albert Einstein erasing Adolf Hitler from reality, leading to a version of the 20th century where Stalin’s Soviet Union is at constant war with the Allies. Unit types became more colorful, weird and sci-fi, giving the series a personality that’s otherwise so elusive in games about military units blowing each other up.
Command and Conquer: Remastered Collection is an extremely welcome facelift of two ’90s RTS classics that’s clearly been developed with great reverence for their many fans. If you spent hundreds of hours knocking down power plants and ore refineries with mammoth tanks in your younger days, this is a treat. It collects Command and Conquer: Tiberian Dawn (the first game) and Red Alert, as well as each of their expansions.
It arrives at a time when the RTS is barely a force at all on PC, outside of shiny re-releases and Starcraft 2’s ever-strong following. Between this and Microsoft’s extensive efforts to update the Age of Empires series, the future of this type of game seems to be revisiting the past (until Age of Empires 4 finally gets here, anyway).
