Everyone’s favorite RTS PC game made it to the iPhone but how well did it exactly transition to the platform?

Command & Conquer Red Alert ($6.99)

For those of you that have been following my reviews, it probably won’t come as much of a surprise that like certain other big franchises (Doom, Resident Evil, etc.) I don’t have much experience with the Command & Conquer franchise.

I was excited to give the iPhone version a try, because my experiences with the other franchises had gone pretty well. Unfortunately, I’m not having such a good time with this one.

Presentation

For the most part the game looks pretty good. It appears to be using a 3D engine, so everything scales nicely when you zoom in and out. The units and buildings are nicely detailed, and everything is well animated. There are even nice little touches like snowmen to add a little variety to the décor. The characters during dialog sequences also look really nice. There are some things that are a bit cheesy, like the walls that go up during construction or the way destroyed units “fade” into the ground.

Controls

To select things you’ll generally click on them. If you click on a building, repair and sell buttons will pop up next to them, which you can click on to perform the corresponding action. In addition there is a menu on the right side of the screen that is building sensitive, assuming that something can be built from that building. To pick an object from that menu you click on it, and repeated clicks will queue up multiple instances of that item to build. The exception to this is if the building allows you to produce other buildings. To construct a building you drag the building type to the spot where you want to construct it and then let go of the screen.

To select a unit you click on it. To select multiple units you first click the group button and then drag a rectangle around the units you want to select.  You can add selected units to a squad by clicking the add units button and then selecting one of three tabs on the left side of the screen. I found dragging the screen around to be sluggish, and sometimes interface elements like scrolls and buttons didn’t respond correctly the first couple of times I pressed them.

Game Play

Here’s what I feel about the game in general: instead of taking the universe that most gamers know and love and making a segment specifically tailored for the iPhone, it feels like they tried to provide a “full blown gaming experience”. Well guess what – my device isn’t capable of handling that, regardless of what some people want to say.

Let’s talk about campaign mode. When you select this mode you must then choose which faction you wish to play. Apparently they assume you are already familiar with the game, because I have not been able to find an explanation of what each faction is. I do know this, however. If you want any in-game explanation of how to play you must choose the red faction. Fortunately, that’s what I did the first time. From there you choose which chapter you wish to play. There appear to be 5 chapters on each side, and once you’ve conquered a chapter you’re free to play it again if you wish.

A chapter requires you to accomplish one or more goals of the destroy something, find something or protect something varieties. Fair enough, as there probably isn’t a whole lot else you can do in an RTS. I do like the fact that not all objectives are given right away, and objectives usually come with a brief cut scene that’s actually in-game. I’ve always preferred that to games that take the story outside of the rest of the action. You’ll start out with anything from a few soldiers and a couple of tanks to a partially constructed base, and it’s up to you to build or commander the rest of your dwellings in addition to whatever else you must accomplish.

On chapter one of the red faction this wasn’t much of a problem. Chapter two required two attempts before I was successful. When I tried chapter three it seemed like I was attacked within a couple of minutes of starting, and the assault never let up, giving me no chance to build up any sort of army. In my opinion that type of level design is not a whole lot of fun. Add to that the fact that the AI has some issues (troops wandering around aimlessly, soldiers going ahead of much more powerful tanks, etc.), and for those of us who don’t quite think in real time the game becomes quite frustrating to play. Playing the blue faction was even worse, as I seemed to lose troops as fast as I could make them on the first chapter.

Suggestions

For me a big part of the problem was that I didn’t have a good grasp of what everything could do for me. I didn’t feel like things were explained well enough, even though there were times in the first couple of chapters of the red faction campaign where it would stop and go through how to do things. Maybe it’s because the tutorial segments were so disjointed, but I didn’t feel like the game really taught me much to help me play the game. It also felt like the maps were quite big.

This may not really be the case, but I had trouble wrapping my brain around where I was going and what I had already accomplished. I really think EA would have been better off creating a C&C experience unique to the iPhone instead of trying to cram the whole C&C experience onto the iPhone.

Conclusion

I wasn’t a fan of portable RTS games before Command And Conquer, and I’m not really a fan after the experience. The game looks good, and there are some core elements to the game that are good, but the overall experience feels too much like I’m playing a PC game on my iPod, instead of playing an iPod game with a PC heritage.

This may thrill hardcore RTS gamers or die hard fans of the series, but for those like me that are a bit more casual in their gaming, Command And Conquer is ultimately going to leave you frustrated. For now I think I’ll stick to Rise Of Lost Empires if I really need an RTS fix.