Down, down, down they go and it is slowly explained that though the Soviets are about to be crushed by the Allied forces, hope may not yet be lost. The story then starts from the Soviet perspective, with Tim Curry an officer in the army who hurriedly escorts General Krukov down into an over-elaborate, super-silly underground lab that’s been cunningly hidden behind a bookcase. The units, the characters, the maps, even the plot – they’ve all been crafted to re-ignite your love for Westwood. Thus the entire game, from the ground-up, is an attempt to fit as seamlessly as possible into the Red Alert franchise. Much of the effort that Electronic Arts has put into the new game has been rightly focused on recapturing the nostalgia of those bygone days when full-motion video was the height of sophistication and nobody had ever thought of making a game with a totally mute character while still telling a decent story. That’s especially true for Red Alert 3 – the sequel to Red Alert, which was the first game I personally ever played on the PC back in the halcyon days when 256MB of RAM was more than enough.