Well, see, what we have here is an expansion pack. What that means is that, for the most part,
Command and Conquer: Yuri's Revenge plays like the original game. Fortunately, enough additions to the original experience have been made that fans of the game should definitely get themselves a copy of this. If
Red Alert 2 left you cold, however, this game won't do anything special for you; it's got some intriguing twists on the genre, but for the most part it plays very much like the original game. Groundbreaking changes are not for expansion packs, though, so that really can't be considered a fault of
Yuri's Revenge.
If you can't guess from the title, Yuri's Revenge is all about our favourite evil Soviet psychic. He's pissed that the war was lost, and he decides that the best solution to the whole thing is to put the entire world under his mental control and become supreme ruler of the land. Of course, neither the Allies or the Soviets are particularly happy about this turn of events, so the game centers around their campaigns against Yuri.
You read that right. Instead of playing against each other as usual, both the Soviets and the Allies are trying to stop the advances of Yuri's army. It's an intriguing twist on the Red Alert formula, and while I would have liked a 'play from the bad guys' campaign along with the two 'normal side' ones, you can't really fault the single-player component of Yuri's Revenge. There's quite a bit of playtime here, and, of course, there's Yuri.
Yuri's side plays rather unlike either of the original Red Alert 2 camps. It's all about control of the enemy's units, and it takes quite a bit of practice to get good with the unique strategies that this offers. Still, the game manages to never feel particularly imbalanced, and every unit has some weakness that you can exploit for victory. The real place that Yuri's Revenge is going to shine is in the multiplayer aspect, and with the new maps and the new side there's definitely going to be even more variety in the Red Alert 2 multiplayer community.
