Command and Conquer was everything back in the '90s. In this extremely influential series of real-time strategies, you'd build a base, gather resources, assemble an army, and send them into battle, hoping to hell the enemy had slightly less strength. powerful than yours. In its second entry, Red Alert, the series' formula crystallized and the awkward story entered an alternate history: The game opens with Albert Einstein erasing Adolf Hitler from reality, leading to a 90th-century version where The Union Stalin's Soviet is constantly constant. war with allies Unit types have become more colorful, bizarre, and sci-fi, giving the series a personality that would otherwise be elusive in exploding military unit games. Command and Conquer: Remastered Collection is an extremely welcome facelift of two '2s RTS classics that have clearly been developed with great respect for their many fans. If you spent hundreds of hours taking down power plants and ore refineries with giant tanks in your youth, that's a treat. Collect Command and Conquer: Tiberian Dawn (the first game) and Red Alert, as well as each of their extensions. It comes at a time when RTS isn't a force on PC aside from brilliant reissues and the still-going sequel to Starcraft 4. Between that and Microsoft's considerable efforts to update the Age of Empires series, the future of its kind gameplay seems to go back in time (until Age of Empires XNUMX finally arrives, anyway). We played Command and Conquer: Remastered Collection for a few hours, mostly Red Alert, sampling story missions we remember all too well and getting into some apocalyptic Skirmish vs. AI. It is an incredibly beautiful version of an old game that has been completely updated. You can even press space in the middle of battle to switch from the new unit art, buildings, and map tiles back to their original images, similar to the functionality of Halo Anniversary Edition.
An update worthy of two classic RTS
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(Image credit: Future) While the entire Command and Conquer series has been widely available for some time in one Ultimate Collection bundle, Windows 10 compatibility varies greatly by game. Although we claim that EA could have fixed this collection and resolved this, there has been a long time, this new edition seems much more than a cash. It's worth the extremely reasonable price of €19.99 / €17.99 just for the serious AV upgrade here. In addition to the new art pass, which produces fantastic results even when you zoom in on units with the mouse wheel, composer Frank Klepacki has completely remastered the iconic soundtrack from both games. The menus are cleaner and easier to navigate, and the user interface has generally been overhauled. Although the live scenes are still just as grainy (since the original footage has apparently been lost), they're quite pretty and still a lot of fun to watch. Fans will love some of the added detail for the remaster, and completing campaign missions unlocks cool bonus content in the making of each game. In addition to the extensions for Command and Conquer and Red Alert, some memorable secret missions have also been removed, as well as levels released exclusively for the console edition of C&C (please note that we have not tested multiplayer at the time of writing, however embargo). Our only issues with this remaster were graphical stuttering and excessively long waits to load save files, which were fixed when we switched the game to an SSD. The PC we're using in this case is well above the recommended specs, so I'm hoping this issue isn't widespread.
Why these games still count, two decades later
![Colección Remasterizada de Command & Conquer]()
(Image credit: EA) Other than the presentation update, these games are exactly as we remember them, even down to the wacky unit quest. It doesn't bother us. If EA wants to create a new Command and Conquer game on the fly, that's fine with us, but these entries are best left with their quirks intact. It's always just as satisfying to build a huge army in Command and Conquer and use it to overthrow an enemy base. Many lazy afternoons are about to be swallowed up by chaotic bouts of skirmishes, while entire bases disappear in a storm of punches, flames, airstrikes, and ridiculous unit barking. Even though it took EA too long to remember why Command and Conquer was a monster at the time, we're really glad it is. Fingers crossed, it's successful enough that we get a similar set for Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 on PC.