BORN IN 1993 - BEEN PLAYING GAMES FOR OVER 20 YEARS AND I CAN HONESTLY SAY THIS IS ONE OF THE WORST THINGS I HAVE EVER PLAYED IN MY LIFE

I CAN'T BELIEVE BETHESDA ACTUALLY MADE PEOPLE PAY FOR THIS

I COULD MAKE A BETTER CAMPAIGN IN DOOM SNAP MAP

Top 5 reasons why DOOM still rocks in 2024 (by a tenderfoot born in 2000):

1. The amount of testosterone per pixel. If you want to play in lower difficulty levels you’ll have to acknowledge your lack of masculinity and pick the “I’m too young to die” option. I find it endearing.
2. The shotgun.
3. The main character’s walk cycle. It’s so exaggerated, I love how much it moves up and down, right and left, and how the weapon also swings around with each step you take. It makes you feel like a fucking berserker.
4. The action is great, but there are also some amazing horror set pieces. Lights will suddenly switch off and you’ll have to survive a shooting in the dark by trusting your instincts and the fleeting light of each shot you fire.
5. Finally, a horde of demons coming from Mars is too cool and iconic to be true and we should point out more often just how well this thing knows its own aesthetic.

Conventional wisdom among my friends was always that this one was better than the original, but I'm not so sure that's the case after playing through both again now.

This has a more-is-more approach, expanding the combat most notably into the air and water with lots more planes and boats. Neither is particularly interesting, and the same simple land-based strategies are as effective as ever, giving you the feeling of having a big arsenal with no real use for much of it.

The story missions have a couple fun twists and objectives to them, but then there are also some pretty heinous puzzle-y "indoor" missions, which can eff right off. Overall it feels like they're stretching a bit. If I'm not mistaken, I believe this was designed as an expansion, originally, and if that's the case, it kind of shows.

Outside of the very clumsy alt-history setting, they're not really doing much of interest with the story here, and the cutscenes are well on the wrong side of cringe. C&C managed to avoid that by making the briefings quick, simplistic, and winking, but that charm is somewhat lost with all these nothing characters and half-hearted attempts at lore and world-building.

At the core, it's the same game, and that game is undeniably cool and fun to play. But the accoutrements are inferior in this one.

Red Alert 1 is about as good as Command & Conquer 1. C&C 1 has a better campaign, but Red Alert 1 has enough unit diversity across its various expansions to be a better Skirmish and Multiplayer game. Unfortunately, Red Alert 1 suffers many of the problems that the C&C 1 has, since at its core, its a reskin. The campaign relies too much on weirdly put together "stealth" missions for the Allies, and an over-reliance on Naval transport across seafaring maps. This wouldn't be a problem if the pathing wasn't so god awful for units, making stuffing units into a transport an utter chore. There are also the missions where you have to capture an enemy building, a building you'd destroy normally in other circumstances. So you're often in the middle of leveling an enemy base when BOOM - "Mission Failed". Oops, I destroyed the Radar Dome I have to capture for some reason. Guess I gotta go build a few Engineers to capture it since 1 Engineer alone can't capture buildings. And those missions are present for BOTH factions.

Despite the frustrating campaign mission design, Skirmish is a blast with things like Chrono Tanks and MAAD Tanks at your disposal. Naval combat is more of a thing in this game but feels lackluster due to the pathing issues the game shares with C&C 1. That's why people go back to Red Alert more, but remember Tiberium's universe as being more iconic.

So Red Alert is hard to rate because of that, so I'll settle on just giving it the same score as C&C1.

Score: 82

The incredibly thick mid-90s computer animation aesthetic still works for some reason, and there are moments when I'll be goddamned if it isn't honestly, unironically, at least a little bit cool.

Which is surprising! I was expecting this one to be a pretty cringey revisit, given just how much time has passed and how focused it was on being proto-Internet-age cutting-edge. But a number of smart choices make it certainly not timeless, but at least dated in a consistent and assured way. Setting the game in a slightly skewed alternate universe a couple years into the future makes the goofier military stuff work intuitively, and from the very start, with the bravura game installation utility/cutscene(!!!), every UI choice cleverly frames the entire game as a war being mediated through computers, which obviously helps sell everything from the gameplay to the artifacted FMV cutscenes.

Lot of little problems like asinine AI and pathing glitches, and it's somewhat limited from a strategic standpoint, but what are you gonna do, it was more or less inventing a genre. Still fun to dive into for a bit, even if it's more a spectacle than a serious strategic challenge these days.