Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2

About Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2

Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 is a real-time strategy video game released for Microsoft Windows on October 25, 2000, as the follow-up to Command & Conquer: Red Alert. Red Alert 2 picks up after the Allied campaign of the first game. Its expansion pack is Command & Conquer: Yuri's Revenge, released a year later in 2001. Red Alert 2 was principally developed by Westwood Pacific in collaboration with Westwood Studios.

Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2 contains two playable factions, the Soviets and the Allies, which both previously appeared in Command & Conquer: Red Alert. The single-player campaign is structured in an alternate-ending mode instead of a progressive story mode. Like its predecessor, Red Alert 2 features a large amount of full-motion video cutscenes between missions and during gameplay, with an ensemble cast including Ray Wise, Udo Kier, Kari Wuhrer, and Barry Corbin.

Like previous Command & Conquer real-time strategy games, Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 contains two separate campaigns with distinct story lines, one for each playable faction.

Red Alert 2 is set in the same alternative history universe as Red Alert in which Adolf Hitler was erased from history by Albert Einstein who travelled to the past through a Time Machine. However, although Hitler is gone, the Soviet Union has taken place of Nazi Germany to launch World War II. Joseph Stalin attempted to conquer Europe, but was defeated by the Allied nations and their military destroyed. Fearing that a regime change would cause mass unrest in the Soviet Union, the victorious Allies installed Alexander Romanov, a distant relative of Tsar Nicholas II, as the puppet Soviet Premier. Romanov acquiesces to the Allies' demands at first, though he builds up the Soviet military for "defense purposes" – a cover for an intended invasion of the United States.

The game's story line starts off in 1972, with the United States Armed Forces caught completely off guard by the sudden massive Soviet invasion of the United States, with Soviet aircraft, naval vessels, amphibious forces, and paratroopers coming in on both the East Coast and West Coast and with the majority of Soviet ground forces coming in through Mexico, starting World War III. The U.S. attempts to retaliate with the use of nuclear missiles, but Yuri, leader of the Soviet Psychic Corps and Premier Romanov's top advisor, uses his mind control to manipulate the personnel charged with launching the warheads and leaves them to explode in their silos. Within hours, the U.S. is overrun with Soviet Army troops. The player either takes the role of an American Commander, tasked by General Ben Carville with defending the United States, or a Soviet Commander leading the invasion for Premier Romanov. Choosing different factions for the campaign will lead to different storylines and endings.