I will be covering both Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert 1 since both are packaged together under the same title. It is not my intention to restate anything I have already written here on IMDb, and since I've done a thousand words on both of the original games as well as their 3 expansion packs that came out for PC, I'm going to focus instead here on how this differs from those since it contains all of them. This has the console only missions. Note that in order to play them you will have to beat the campaigns the same is true for the bonus videos and music tracks. I'm not going to detail all of those; it's in the promotional materials. Also to be clear I am not at all criticizing the choice to have the player forced into earning those. That's part of the idea here. You put effort in and you get something out of it. That's why we play video games, at least the ones that are like this. That always baffled me when reading reviews of Just Cause 3, and people were complaining that some of the stuff that is the most compelling to use is not available for immediate use. After all, they're not putting in all this effort just to have people pick and choose and just go immediately to the dessert. They want us to redo all of the stuff leading up to it as well understandably so.
This does indeed come with a massive upgrade in both visual and audio quality. And if you're feeling nostalgic you can revert to the originals. It runs smoothly on modern systems. When it comes to multiplayer you can change around some settings depending on if you do or do not want the units introduced in DLC. Which is a quite good addition considering that a lot of people never played those and it completely alters the way you strategize. It also features CTF, No Base and other things that really keep this fresh. There is a map editor that is fairly reminiscent of the one for Starcraft and Brood War, more so than for example what Age of Empires 2 had. So yes, you can really put your signature all over the ones you make here, placing as far as I could tell basically everything that you want that is in one of these. I'm not the best judge of how active a community for this sort of thing is, but I could definitely tell some people had gone out and made a bunch of stuff and since this is on Steam it's very easy to find, download and the like.
This addresses certain things that were already annoyances in the old releases and would for many be complete no-goes for something put out today. I will briefly note before I detail them, unfortunately there is a lot left intact. I'm going to try to get into the stuff that has been improved. Sadly that does not include something like significantly(only somewhat) better AI pathfinding. For some reason your harvester will still travel away from the refinery instead of focusing on the raw material literally right in front of it, wasting valuable time. Anyway. This enables you to move your view faster by holding down RMB. There are also certain things where you can include that key, instead of only LMB. You can save camera setups at will extremely, useful for large bases, whether your own or someone else's once discovered. There is Select All, including one that is global so you don't have to go around choosing manually. Also, there is Attack Move, finally! I am still baffled as to how they didn't add that until they got to Generals in 2003, when some of its contemporaries had it in 1998. Possibly earlier but those are definitely ones I can confirm.
So in various ways it limits the micromanaging that these had so much of. It also changes around some strengths of armor and such making things more even. This is of course a huge relief as that was a weakness of these that was for example not shared by aforementioned competitors. And all four factions can now produce Rocket Soldiers, something that was always quite the ridiculous oversight considering that no other infantrymen can shoot down flying units, even though they're a major part of quite a few successful attack forces in these. This is all accomplished without negating them being asymmetric, since that is one of the things we love these for. And was actually significantly limited once EA took over and did what they always do. When these first came out I barely paid attention to who was developing what but I could immediately tell that there was a completely different philosophy of design behind Yuri's Revenge and its parent game. And then we got stuff like Zero Hour. You can really tell that they are deeply unwilling to let these different sides have certain things that the others don't.
I personally did not run into any issues with this at all. And every negative review I've read of it(which I'm not sure exceeds a dozen. All the same thing) appear to be talking about stuff that's also true of the quarter century old ones that this is redoing. Which is of course 100 percent fair. I'm not saying they can't do that. My point is I haven't come across someone who took issue with the changes or the new stuff who weren't saying that they wish it had gone further. A bunch of them seemed to have not played these before at all and I can 100% sympathize with trying to get into these all these years later and with so many competitors that do still top these in a number of ways. This really is primarily for returning players who don't want to deal with the outdated stuff and newcomers who are rather very forgiving. 8/10.
