Command & Conquer: Red Alert
Erik Yeo, senior game designer at Westwood and the driving force behind the highly successful Command & Conquer game, dropped by the PC Gamer offices recently with a very playable version of Red Alert, the prequel to Command & Conquer.Some important details: The shipping date is definitely looking like November 19th, but an Internet demo probably won't be available until after the game ships.
Unit types in Red Alert will include air, land and sea units, and includes special units like spies, thieves, and individual characters. Spies can infiltrate enemy communication centers -- which in multi-player games, will let you intercept the typed messages being sent between allied players.
Some of the missions have a timer countdown in them, and you must accomplish certain tasks before the timer expires; the one we played had a ten minute timer that ticks down before a convoy of your trucks arrive. You must clear as many of the enemies off the map as you can before the convoy arrives, for if the enemy wipes out your convoy, you lose.
Westwood has really listened to the E-mails and suggestions they've received over the months regarding what should go into Red Alert. Therefore they've added a complete map editor, and the majority of the missions are production missions, with only three or four of the fifteen missions involving a handful of units who must accomplish each scenario.
Players can play as five different nations -- Russia, Ukraine, Greece, England, or France. For multi-player, Red Alert will support TCP/IP and Westwood's own chat program, running off their server, so you can find other players across the Internet quite easily by logging on to the Westwood site.
And we finally found out what the mysterious Chronosphere and Iron Curtain do... The Chronosphere lets the Allied player teleport units across the map, where they can fire off a few quick shots, and then are whipped back to their starting location as time corrects itself. The Iron Curtain is the Russians's secret tool. With it, they can temporarily turn any unit invulnerable, for a brief period of time. The unit must be next to the Iron Curtain device in your base, so if you want to use it on the attack, you'd better be quick!
Besides ice and land terrain, we've also got some screen shots of a mission that takes place inside buildings. Here, you've got to maneuver your troops past these barrels before the Allies open fire on you: the barrels will explode in one long, lethal chain reaction, much like Doom, if you're not quick.
Check out these other screen shots:
An interior mission; 96 kilobytes
Another shot from the same level; 81 kilobytes
