After spending some time with the Beta of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, I can say that it’s the worst in a long line of flops in the venerable C&C series.
Let’s get this out of the way up front – I don’t care that this is a Beta. I’m judging it, period. I don’t feel that anything will be significantly improved or altered for release.
Path finding is terrible, the unit abilities are a joke and you hardly have time to use them in battle because everything is over before you even realize it. The inability to zoom out to any level further than you could in the 90’s is a sad development choice by Electronic Arts. You can’t queue up buildings, meaning each has to be built and placed one at a time. Units often get stuck on each other or buildings, and the unit AI chooses targets extremely poorly. Your troops won’t fire on nearby enemies for no apparent reason – they just stand there and wait to be shot. The graphics aren’t anything special, and the scale seems less than that of previous entries into the series. The “Empire of the Rising Sun” faction is clearly dominant, especially in certain types of maps.
I haven’t been a fan of any C&C game since Red Alert 2 back in 2000. It seems like EA has ignored all of the advancements made in the RTS genre and used little to no imagination in rehashing a classic. What a shame.