the game is made UNFAIRLY. The russians are way much stronger and powerful than the allies. Eventough by playing on the allies side is very challenging, the fact that the game is made unfairly and so i gave it one star.

the best is still the original C&C by westwood.

"Stunning, but it could be better!"
Definatly an improvement to Comand & Conquer. Its great portrail of the worlds history brings out the beauty of the games wonders. Although it coule be much better, it does lack in certain qualities but not many or majoy ones. You would think that the follow up - Tiberian Sun would have tried to follow on Red Alerts great game play but sadly no. It just came up far behind being way to dark and mystereous. Red Alerts weapons, vehicles, people and buildings are just right and not futuristiky which is good. And to top it all off it is just sooooo adictive once you start playing it. You just have to get to the next level, thats why it is so good and worth what you will pay for it.

"Don't buy this package...."
Red alert is a great game and certainly worth buying but you can pick it up in a variety of packages and prices here on amazon and this one is NOT the most economical. I'll explain later.

Now to the game. Yes red alert is now an old game by PC standards. The graphics are still ok but not obviously up to snuff compared to tiberian sun or it's sequal red alert 2. Never the less red alert is a blast and might still be the most enjoyable, playable game in the whole command and conquer seris including those newer games. Anybody familiar with any one CnC game basically knows how to play them all because the concept is the same. You need two resources to function. The most important resource is had by making refineries and sending out harvesters to gather it. In this game it is called ore, in tiberian sun it is called tiberian but it all doesn't matter because the entire game is focused on getting as many harvesters at work as possible and protecting them so you have the credits neccesary to build your military. From an offensive perspective of course you want to try and cut off your opponents harvesters and that's at least half the game. The other resource is power which is easily had by building power plants from time to time.

The game features two very evenly matched sides in a mostly conventional military battle. The russians and the ukrainians on one side and the allies on the other with germany, france and england. The russians and the ukrainians have the bigger more powerful tanks, a heavy tank and the mammoth. The allies have tanks that are smaller quicker and cheaper. The russians can make deadly telsa coils for defense which electrocute the enemy while the ally countries can make cheaper better armoured conventional turrets and pill boxes. The russians can make a substantial air attack with fast flying mig bombers and yaks. The allies are limited to helecopters but can make a real navy with destroyers and crusiers while the other side can only make defensive submarines. The sides are balanced and which country you choose to play with will be determined by the map. If the map has lot's of water on it you may prefer to be one of the ally countries so you can build a navy.

Overall the action is constant and the battles can be intense. One of the things that sets this game and all the CnC games apart from other rts games is that these games are much more base camp limited. In this game you have a command center and you build around it. You can make a sevice depot and then make an mcv but you still have to place it down some place and build around it. Those who are more used to games like total annililation or age of empires may find this confining. In those games you have mobile units that allow you to build anything anywhere on the map irregardless of how close or far they may be from another structure or unit. Here you have to build within the camp and while you can make mcv's and build other camps they are not easy to protect and mcv's are expensive. Normally in the course of a game you may have your major camp and one smaller additional one whose purpose is to protect you harvesters as they have to go out further and further for ore.

Overall red alert is a very fun well balanced game that still has many followers today. Go on mplayer or westwood and you will find dozens even hundreds of players. There are dozens of good downloads available online including mega maps and desktop theme packs. I highly recommend the coop maps which allow you and a bud to ally and take on a super charged AI opponent. With coop you can really play as a single team where each player can control the others units and the maps are great.

Finally, don't buy this game package. You can buy just red alert for $ so why pay more for this? Also red alert is now available in a couple of nice game packages. You can buy red alert and gettysburg along with another rts game in one package and another package allows you to buy 10 games including this one.