Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 - Yuri's Revenge
An expansion for Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2
The game begins with a presidential briefing in the White House concerning Yuri and how he has begun his take over of the world through mind control. Yuri interrupts the briefing to explain how he plans to take over the world, telling the American President Michael Dugan that he has a network of Psychic Dominators around the world, which he is now beginning to reveal. One of Yuri's Psychic Dominators is on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco, which Yuri activates just before ending his transmission to the White House. The President immediately calls in an airstrike on the device, but all the attacking aircraft were shot down, although one crashes into the nuclear reactor on the island, causing the device to lose power and to not function. Despite this, Yuri activates his other Psychic Dominators around the world and the majority of the planet quickly succumbs to Yuri's mind-control.
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I like the new Yuri faction, but the mind control mechanics are both too strong and too weak. Too strong in that you can lose control of a unit in an instant to a Mastermind, Yuri Clone, or tower; too weak in that once you have the hard counters to these things (robotic units, air units, and dogs) then he's got dick all to stop you. Yuri feels underbaked and overgeneralized in this regard, whereas the Soviets and Allies gets lots of interesting and varied units to fill specific gaps in their arsenals.
They try to use the campaign missions to introduce you to the new "national" units - like the Black Eagle - but there's not really much opportunity to use them. Most of the missions are straightforward slugfests where you get a base, he gets a base, and now it's time for mass destruction. Vanilla RA2 struck a better texture with its missions in this regard. Still, this series has come a long way since Tiberian Dawn's soul-crushingly difficult micro-fests, and I still enjoyed the whole campaign, so whatever.
Rest in pieces CyberLenin...