Review by: Troy S. Goodfellow

It’s always a bad sign when the opening mission of a mini-campaign requires constant reloading. You have to take a small Soviet team and hook-up with other troops already in the area. Then you have to free three scientists. Then you have to escort at least one of them to safety. Then you watch helplessly as artillery pounds your eggshell scientists into the ground. Having received a steady stream of reinforcements throughout the mission, getting cut off from outside help hits you like an unexpected slap in the face.

Get used to the slap.

Red Alert 3: Uprising is the obligatory expansion to a mostly unsatisfying game and it does nothing to hide the failings of its parent. The units are still too fragile and fussy, you still cannot select just those units in a specific battle mode and more attention has been paid to the pointless cutscenes than to basic scenario design. Even fans of Red Alert 3 will probably be let down by this pack.

Uprising does have a couple of things in its favor. The Yuriko mini-campaign gives you a single unit to control through three missions full of destruction, exploration and upgrading, and the Challenge mode gives you a ‘par time’ to meet in a series of missions. As you complete each mission, a new unit is unlocked for you to use in future Challenge matches. Had they addressed some of the core problems of the game and added just this mode, then Uprising could be recommended. The Challenge mode is a unique variation on the RTS model and is, in some ways, a better tutorial than the tutorial itself. The increasing level of challenge and setting of “par times” gives the game more longevity than any other part of the expansion.

Still, the new units add little to build queues that were already much too elaborate and multifaceted to be comprehensible. And the over arching plot of the Uprising campaigns have the usual not-so-shocking twists and painfully obvious scripting that takes a lot of the challenge away, notwithstanding the peculiarity of some of the mission structure. In other words, Uprising does nothing to lift Red Alert 3 or move it in any really interesting direction.

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