ONE scientist survived, with half-health. By mission's end, I was simply rushing the Scientists through the enemy bases. I had an army of a dozen Flak troopers, Conscripts, and Tesla troopers, along with three Soviet Scientists. There IS no strategy involved you must RUN THROUGH an Allied base as fast as you can. Then comes the final bit, where you have to wander aimlessly around a maze to rescue Soviet scientists, while the Pacifier deploys into an artillery position with EXTREME range reminiscent of Red Alert 1's Allied Cruiser, complete with splash damage. It's one of the worst opening levels to an RTS game in memory, and it must be completed to open up two of the other campaigns." The first mission involves taking a militia force of Soviet conscripts and flak troopers, and barrelling through Allied infantry, tanks, aircraft, everything of the sort. No clever problem-solving required, just run for your life and hope for a lucky break. Finally, miraculously, you manage to dodge enough of the instant-death missiles to escape the level. It's as if you're being punished for thinking you want to play some more Red Alert 3. This is bad enough, but they're sickeningly over-powered. Towards the end of the mission the level instructions specifically tell you to avoid engaging the units that you have pass to get out. The failure conditions are so hard to control, and so utterly galling, that there's no reason why you'd want to continue playing. They perfectly sum up the entire experience of the game: "why wouldn't we want to play another stretch of the Command & Conquer series' wackiest RTS offshoot? Well, perhaps because it's p*ss-boilingly frustrating." "The very first mission is a baffling exercise in face-palming idiocy - a poorly designed onslaught in which confusion repeatedly leads to death. I read a review from EuroGamer complaining about the game's difficulty. Yuriko becomes insanely more powerful than she was in the base game, as well as having many powers that provide lots of fun in the game, particularly tossing objects about. The only problems here is that there is no minimap and that you can't see distant enemies off screen. The interface changes, with the camera and control focused only on Yuriko. The Yuriko campaign really shines brightest. For Yuriko, you break out of the facility that "created" you, then break out of the FutureTech Allied prison camp, then break back into the facility.
For the Japanese, Tatsu is working with the Shogun to push the Allies completely out of Japan and re-establish the Empire and begin to rebuild. His betrayal is obvious from the second mission. For the Allies, you deal with putting down aggressive actions by the Japanese Shogun, with Tatsu helping you. For the Soviets, all you really do is some minor guerrilla-type actions, attacking FutureTech and exposing some of their war crimes to the world. The missions: You play as the Soviets, Allies, Japanese, or Yuriko, for 3 missions each.