System Requirements

OS: Windows 95, 98, NT 4.0, 2000, and Millennium CPU: PII 266 with 350 MB of hard drive space RAM: 64MB of RAM VIDEO: 2Mb of Video RAM, 16 bit color CD-ROM: 4X CD-ROM drive SOUND: Direct Sound Compliant Sound Card Modem: 56K Modem or faster for multiplayer

Command & Conquer: Yuri's Revenge picks up much where the first left off, both in plot and game play, making a significant addition to the Red Alert 2 plot and adding a completely new side to the game's existing factions.

Story:

Yuri's Revenge begins soon after the conclusion of RA2, where the Soviets have been defeated, Romanov has been imprisoned in the Tower of London, and the Allies are just beginning to breathe easily again. The Allies' party is cut short, however, when Alcatraz Island is captured by the forces of the rogue Soviet psychic, Yuri, who has, during the war in RA2, secretly built up his own secret army of psychics and mutants. Yuri has constructed a massive network of mind control devices which he intends to use to take over the world. Fortunately, an Allied air strike succeeds in knocking out the power for the Alcatraz device, creating a hole in Yuri's mind control umbrella. The Allies waste no time in executing a daring plan to time travel into the past and stop the Yuri threat before it ever begins. The fragmented Russian forces, however, have not been sleeping, and will attempt their own plan to use the Allies' time travel device not only to stop Yuri, but to change the outcome of the war as well.

Game Play:

As far as gameplay goes, Yuri's Revenge doesn't add much new to the interface, but adds quite a bit to the game itself. The game not only adds several new Allied and Soviet units, while tweaking both existing sides slightly, but also adds Yuri's army to the lineup. While the new units to the existing sides are meant to bolster the weaknesses of the two, Yuri's army has a personality completely its own. Almost every unit that Yuri uses possesses some bizarre ability based upon either mind control, genetic engineering and mutation, or weird science. While the Allies and Soviets prefer to use the strengths of their units against their enemies, Yuri aims to turn the fury of his enemies back upon themselves. Needless to say, there's a serious amount of fun to be had with Yuri's army, as well as some cool new sound effects.

A New Hero

The game introduces a C&C first: the hero unit. Hero units are infantry units that you can only own one of at a time (unless you own a specific piece of Yuri technology: the cloning vats), have greater armor and speed than other infantry, have effective weapons against infantry, armor, and structures, and cannot be mind controlled. In the single-player campaigns, the hero units will appear as specific characters in the game, and their loss means loss of the mission.

Cons

You've heard the good - now hear the bad. YR games take much longer to load than original RA2 games, and the game itself does not include a Yuri campaign for single player, even though you can play as Yuri's army in single player skirmish mode and multiplayer. My biggest pet peeve with YR is that all the little tweaks and unit additions and swapping between Yuri's Army and the Soviets has seriously thrown off the fine side balance of RA2, making the Soviets next to impossible to use effectively in multiplayer, and making the Allies and (especially) Yuri very difficult to take on. A patch has made some minor modifications to the side balance, but nothing big enough to really fix the botched side balance.

Multiplayer

Multiplayer has been improved, with a whole slew of new maps, new gaming modes, and far greater control over game conditions, especially over any AI players. Multiplayer is available from Westwood\'s free gaming service, Westwood Online, but is also available from Gamespy Arcade.

Appropriate:

From a Christian standpoint, we get mostly more of the same as from RA2. The babe-ish (is that a word?) Tanya makes a return, but, nicely enough, swearing remains non-existent. As far a game play goes, the violence is low and completely bloodless.

Conclusion

Overall, Command & Conquer: Yuri's Revenge treats to the same clean, fast-paced, frenetic game play as Red Alert 2, adding a new side, new multiplayer options, and a brand-new C&C bad guy to beat up on. Despite its shortcomings, Yuri's Revenge is a solid buy for anyone who owns Red Alert 2.

Final Score: B