Command & Conquer Remastered Collection

In this remaster, you get the first game, and Red Alert, with expansions for both. You can switch between old and new graphics by pressing the spacebar.

In the first game, there are two campaigns so you can choose between the good guys; GDI, and the bad guys; NOD.

The maps in each mission are quite small, but still can take 30 mins to an hour to complete. The missions usually have some restriction on what you can build and create; generally more units are available over the course of the campaign.

There’s a few missions where you have a limited army and cannot create any more units. There’s one where you have just one commando dude but he can basically one-shot snipe soldiers, and blow up buildings with one explosive.

You gather a resource called Tiberium to generate money. With the money you can construct buildings like Power Plant, Barracks, Vehicle Factory, Silos, Refinery, Guard Towers. You can only build next to your buildings, so you can’t easily cover the map, or block off areas. You can only have 2 bases by stealing buildings from your enemy by sending an Engineer into them. Since both forces have different units, taking Barracks or Vehicle Factories gives you access to new units.

Double-click to select all units of the same type. Can assign groups by Ctrl+num, then select them by pressing the number.

The game has a lot of friendly fire. It’s hard to stop your grenadiers and tanks from hurting all your other troops, and it's very easy to do so when you are attacking your opponent's base. You don’t have much room to maneuver so you end up wiping out your own army.

Tanks can run over soldiers, and are good against buildings and other vehicles. They aren’t good at shooting soldiers though

Light scout vehicles are great for gunning down infantry. NOD have access to flamethrowers which wipe groups of infantry in seconds. Rocket troopers are great against most things really and can even attack GDI Orcas which are helicopters.

NOD can construct laser towers which are one of the most infuriating parts of the game. They are very powerful, have good range, attack speed, and can take out any ground units in seconds. You may think you can easily attack them with aircraft, but usually there are a few SAMs around. “Take out the SAMs first” you say; see the first point; the laser will wipe you out. Additionally, the AI loves churning out missile troops, which are good against tanks and helicopters, so you basically end up in a stalemate. It seems like you often can’t win apart from sending a huge army in and just accepting the casualties.

It’s annoying that you have to wipe out every enemy, especially when soldiers like hiding behind trees and you cannot see them.

Another annoying aspect is the path-finding. Often your units will split from the group and venture straight into enemy lines. They struggle to get across choke points like bridges, Tiberium harvesters will have no trouble reaching the Tiberium, but then decide to go a different way and take a tour along the cliff before giving up and going the proper way.

The developers didn’t intend to fix the game’s flaws. It’s just a remaster. Although there are tweaks to the menu and the ability to queue up units.

There’s the original music, remastered music, and bonus music, and you have control over it via the jukebox. There’s behind the scene’s footage and outtake videos to unlock. You can play the console missions too.

I only played a bit of Red Alert, but it’s largely the same gameplay. The games will have been amazing at the time, but they are pretty dated by today’s standards. It takes a long time to get through the campaigns, so there’s plenty of content here.