Command & Conquer: Red Alert - Counterstrike

Hmmm, Let Me See, What Could You possibly be expecting from an add-on disk for Red Alert? How about a new plot, played out as a campaign over a long series of missions, and maybe a few new units to spice the campaign up a bit and make multi-player games more exciting? And then, of course, C&C just wouldn't be the same without those fantastic cut-scenes to set the scene before and after a mission, so yes, we'll have some more of that please.

Having stated my wish-list it's time to have a look at the C&C: Counterstrike package. Well, you can forget the new campaign for a start. What we've got here is 16 new single-player missions (eight Allied and eight Soviet) and a few new units (tesla tanks, elite super soldiers, wonder dogs and superjets).

And that's about it really. There's no new campaign, and no new cutscenes either - you simply load up the missions in whatever order you like and attempt to complete the objective at hand. That's not to say that the missions are boring, or that they're any better or worse than the ones in the original Red Alert - it's just that while playing them you may feel as though you're ploughing through them for the sake of it as opposed to progressing through a structured campaign. On the plus side, the new missions are nowhere near as difficult as the ones in Covert Operations (with the exception of the first mission, which is a bit of a nightmare), but of course that just means you'll get through them all the more quicker, which leaves... what?

Nothing

Well, not quite nothing. Let's have a look at what you get for $14.99 apart from the 16 new missions: eight new audio tracks (whoop-de-doo), a Red Alert desktop theme pack, the latest upgrades for Red Alert (fair enough), the most recent version of chat@Westwood (ermmmmm), a code in the box to unlock the four secret ant missions (which admittedly are kind of cool) and over 100 new multi-player missions.

Hang on a minute, 100 new multi-player missions? So you can play in skirmish mode or on the Net using all the new units, right? Fab. Er, 'fraid not. Westwood, in their infinite wisdom, have decided not to include the new units in the multi-player levels. Even as I write this there are people on the Net complaining about this very fact in no uncertain terms. So in a nutshell then, apart from the gimmicky extras, we've got 16 new missions, four new units (which you can only use in some of the new missions) and 100 new multi-player maps which would have benefited greatly from the inclusion of some new toys to play with.

And this is why I can't cite C&C: Counterstrike as an essential purchase. However, it is only fifteen quid, and if all you're looking for is another short blast of what made the original the classic it most deservedly is, as well as 100 new multi-player levels (Internet and skirmish mode), then you can't really go wrong.