And it spoils little to say that the initial revelation unveils a third-party mega-corporation with enough capital and high-tech weaponry to put all three warring factions to shame. The “Wounded Wolf” Empire of the Rising Sun and the “Tough Reform” Allied campaigns are available immediately after completing the opening revelation of Uprising. Only “The Tale of Yuriko” and the Soviet campaigns are available from go. The bits of computer-hacked info are juicy but feel oddly out of context, despite the focus of the campaign while Yuriko’s audible responses to the info send her character reeling from gentle naivety to Firestarter-scary to sadistically megalomaniacal, but not necessarily in that order.
The wide-berth hallways of the science labs are appropriately sterile, but are look-alike enough to lose your bearings in the sameness. The mini-campaign – one of four comprising the stand-alone expansion – is a winning idea, though it feels like the R&D budget for said idea dipped into the red. The prequel looks at the origins of commando Yuriko Omega, a Japanese school-girl-skirted psionic nightmare with the power to blow up units and tear down buildings with megatons of mental TNT. Uprising is a continuation of the events concluding Red Alert 3, although the would-be jewel of the package is a prequel, dungeon-crawler campaign. The Red Alert series has always capitalized on a now all-too-common alternative history scenario: bringing the Cold War to a ‘weapons hot’ apex, where the Soviets, Allies, and Japanese take off the kid gloves and duke it out. It’s uncertain what effect they were going for, but surprisingly dull probably wasn’t it. The most squeezed out of these cutscenes is a cocky grin or an exasperated sigh. The biggest missed opportunity is in how very little Uprising takes advantage of the series inherent campiness. Eva McKenna, 16-time world heavyweight wrestling champion Ric Flair is the slurring Commander Hill, and Malcolm McDowell – flawless as always – is Allied Commander in Chief Rupert Thornley. Gemma Atkinson (Hollyoaks) reprises her role as Lt. Red Alert 3: Uprising crews the largest live-action cast of any Command & Conquer expansion ever released, though only Guinness Book of World Records readers will feel the need to bandy that statistic around. The market isn’t cornered – it’s simply packed up its belongings and moved on, leaving the venerable series gloating over a feature that certainly warrants mention, but isn’t worth discussing much further once it’s been said out loud. As the Need for Speed for the RTS set, saying that Command & Conquer has the market cornered on live-action video would be something of a misnomer.
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