While many of the missions in the expansion aren't presented on quite the same epic scale as the original game, they still do a fairy good job of providing interesting gameplay and varied objectives, and ultimately do present a much more interesting story. Like the original, Red Tide is still presented as a strategy game which lets you either manage your troops from above, or hit the "direct control" button to manipulate your units with the keyboard handling movement, and the mouse handling aiming. There's no base-building involved though; you're instead encouraged to take the troops you start with and utilize the game's verbose tactical options and inventory management system to try and make the most out of them.

That said, the difficulty is a bit of an issue. Even on the game's easiest setting, it was all too often that I ended up screwed over when I lost an essential tank or other vehicle and found myself simply without the necessary means to complete an objective. An example would be a front line assault on an entrenched German position, surrounded by mines and backed by artillery cannons. It's far too easy to advance my armor and use its firepower to start cutting down the infantry, only to find it instantly destroyed by an enemy artillery gun that I didn't account for. Since my infantry quickly became the equivalent of ground meat when trying to charge the defenses head on, the only real options were to either reload and hope I could keep my tanks back far enough to be effective without getting obliterated, or try to sneak my infantry around the enemy's flanks with the risk that one man might trip over a mine and instantly blow my entire team back to Moscow.

Fortunately, the challenge makes the game perfectly-suited to co-operative play, because one can tackle these problems as a team and try a wide variety of approaches and ideas to get through the missions. The open-ended nature of the engine (which allows for things like ripping the machinegun off of a tank when out of ammo and giving it to a common infantryman to gun down Germans) provides even more possibilities.

However, this where we tripped over the game's fatal flaw: the utter and complete lack of multiplayer. You could've cut the tension with a butter knife when we prepared to order up a copy of Red Tide upon its release, only to find through the game's official community forums that co-op play had inexplicably been given the axe for the expansion.

Co-operative play is rapidly becoming a more and more prominent feature in the industry (rightfully so), and the fact that the developers so casually overlooked the enormous amounts of fun the game can deliver when played in co-op is a sign that someone out there clearly didn't get it. While in my heart I want to give this expansion pack a great rating for augmenting the original game's already-fun mission set with an all new campaign and a bunch of new toys to play with, I'm going to end up doling out demerits simply for taking away one of the most important features that made the original game so special. The solo game is decent enough but without the ability to play this game with friends it simply loses its edge.