YMMV / Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3

YMMV page for the overall series:

• Command & Conquer: Red Alert Series

Red Alert 3:

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Is Cherdenko's laughter on announcing his escape to space truly just Tim Curry Corpsing? Or is it because he's just that thrilled at the idea of going to space - or that his sanity is dwindling more and more with his back against the wall?
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Bears sniffing out spies actually happened.
• Awesome Music:
  • Frank Klepacki returned to make Hell March 3, and a handful of other tracks.
  • The battle themes are all pretty great, but the Uprising theme for the Empire is pretty damn awesome, as seen here.
  • While there is no way to be conclusive, we're pretty sure that, had it been around in 1945, the Krasnya Armiya would've marched into Berlin singing this.
• Breather Level:
  • The fifth Imperial mission compared to the previous. While the Allies still use plenty of Cryocopters and Hydrofoils, you gain access to some actually decent surface-to-air units on the ocean (Sea-Wings), as well as being provided a very powerful fleet that's pretty much grown into Game-Breaker status due to them destroying helpless MCVs, allowing most to be Elite by the time the second part of the mission begins. The Floating Fortress' built-in cannons helping with defense and the extra Ore Nodes on the Floating Fortress itself don't hurt. Giles' bases also notably lack Spectrum Towers, which acted as a considerable roadblock when they appeared in Warren's base the mission prior.
  • Similarly, the Moscow level comes right after the brutal Yokohama level (where the enemy sends wave of top-tier units from the beginning against a damaged and barely-functional base, and there's a time limit), in which you start with multiple defense cores and a good base in order to destroy the Kremlin... and you get the Shogun Executioner. There's also the option to skip through half of the mission by capturing the Soviet VIP bunkers, which in turn convert the nearby structures to your control (for you to use or sell).
  • Finally, the Amsterdam level is pretty reasonable in its difficulty compared to previous missions and the other campaign finales. It's mostly a ground battle, as there's only narrow rivers in the area, limiting the use of Naval power, and the game forbids the use of air units until the nearby Allied air base is destroyed. You start off with Yuriko, two King Onis, and some infantry for good measure, which should be enough to breach its defenses (if you don't intend to use Wave Force Artillery for good measure). Though the Allies have a Proton Collider, it only takes destroying the power plant next to one of them to shut them down, which can be done with a few Final Squadron strikes. Destroying the bridges makes holding out against the Allies' counterattacks more predictable. Even the arrival of the Soviet remnants isn't much of an issue, given that Zelinsky apparently forgets to secure any Ore Nodes. In short, it's a pretty straightforward, linear assault that can be made easy with the use of Yuriko and a number of well trained armored units.
  • Certain missions in Uprising's Commander Challenge can be less difficult or tedious than others before them:
    • Tesla's Castle is an unusual scenario where Moskvin has pre-established bases throughout the map, with Tesla Troopers, Tanks, and Coils littered throughout the map, with Super Reactors powering up the last ones. It feels more like a campaign mission than the Challenge's usual Skirmish layouts. You still start out with only a Construction Yard, but thankfully the enemy attacks are rather weak and docile, and it's just a matter of your forces navigating the maze and eliminating the bases one by one. This all takes place after the hectic Offshore Killing and Chrono You Didn't, where the enemy attacks are more rampant.
    • No Place to Hide involves defending your base against Giles' Spies being sent to mess around with your structures and forces. He also has troops on the ground to the north, but you can easily bypass them with an amphibious assault across the lake. With the use of Scouts to neuter the Spies' disguises, it's all a matter of rolling over Giles' base with the amphibious units of your choosing. This all takes place after Number One Threat to America, involving giant Bears that can rip the toughest units to shreds (necessitating the use of certain units that are really deadly against Infantry, such as Stingrays or Tanya), and Oleg having access to the entire Soviet tech tree if you don't act fast enough.
    • Battle Royale pits all the Imperial commanders against you and each other in a basic free-for-all. It's not uncommon for Takara to be overrun by both Shinzo and Kenji, and it's all a matter of conventional tactics to overrun everybody as they're distracted by one another. This mission is unlocked after beating the grueling Robots and Ninjas, where Shinzo, Kenji, and Moskvin all gang up on you and harass your base with Shinobi and Terror Drones, requiring you to wall off the tiny little island your base is on lest you suffer the consequences.
    • Come and Get It, starring the Psionic Decimator, is a mission that's a great deal less brutal than its other Superweapon missions, The Final Countdown, which involves a Race Against the Clock against Giles' multiple Proton Colliders, and Arms Race, where Top Secret Protocols are unlocked at an accelerated rate, and Oleg wastes no time in harassing your base and building up his Vacuum Imploder. Here, Shinzo just camps out in his base, fortifying his position and builds up the Psionic Decimator. He doesn't pay your base any heed with his own troops, allowing you to secure more resources, build up a sizeable force of your own, and overrun his base.
• Broken Base: Many people find the static ore nodes disappointing and makes it too easy for players to camp. Others are absolutely relieved that they don't have to deal with Artificial Stupidity when it comes to resource gathering, allowing them to focus more on combat. This extends to the tone and gameplay changes compared to Red Alert 2.
• Complete Monster: Anatoly Cherdenko is a hammy Soviet colonel who uses Dr. Zelinsky's Time Machine to murder Albert Einstein and rewrite history to one where the USSR reigns supreme, and Cherdenko himself is Premier. Overseeing World War III and refusing to restore time to its proper state even as countless innocents die, Cherdenko's actions differ in each campaign, but are monstrous in their own way. In the Soviet campaign, Cherdenko first uses his new commander to assassinate the Emperor of the Empire of the Rising Sun, then lures Allied forces into a truce meeting just to kill them all. Cherdenko then frames and kills his own ally Krukov before betraying and trying to exterminate his loyal new commander and all the man's allies. In the Allied campaign, Cherdenko agrees to a truce with the Allies, only to leave them to die while he intends to use a fleet of warships to bomb every major Allied city across the world and kill millions, reacting to defeat by attempting to abandon his allies and flee to the one place not yet tainted by capitalism: Space. In the Imperial campaign, he also makes an attempt to flee with the time machine upon being cornered by the Empire of the Rising Sun, where the Imperial high command would fear the worst should he ever use it again.
• Crazy Is Cool: President Ackerman, after his Face–Heel Turn. Who else would turn Mount Rushmore into a supervillain lair complete with Death Ray?
• Demonic Spiders: Take your pick: The Allies Chrono Time Bomb, the Soviet Magnetic Satellite or Orbital Drop, or the Rising Sun's Final Squadron support powers. All of them are devastating, difficult to counter, and will give you major headaches.
  • The Soviet Magnetic Satellite deserves a special mention. It has the ability to One-Hit Kill most vehicles and naval units but literally sucking them up into space. This means that entire groups of big, expensive units that took a lot of time and money to build can be wiped out in just seconds. On a positive note, it's slow, giving faster units time to dodge and escape from it.
• Designated Hero: The Allies. Their sociopathic attitudes are very obvious in spite of the game trying to portray them as "good". Although that may have been intentional.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: In terms of gameplay function, the Archer Maiden units are this, due to being the only other Anti-Air Infantry available for the Empire aside from the Rocket Angels, which are unlocked late in the game due to being Tier 3 units, while the Archer Maidens are available right from the beginning at Tier 1. The convience of them has not gone unnoticed by the modding community, as you can expect to find them even in mods that exclude most of the new Uprising units due to their practicality.
• Evil Is Cool: Emperor Yoshiro, the leader of the Empire of the Rising Sun. He has a condescending and collected attitude that makes him entertaining to watch, and it helps that he is one of the only Generals to actively try and stop the player with his protoype King Oni. It also helps that he's played by George Takei.
• Fetish Retardant:
  • The game, in its attempt to bring more fanservice to the table than its predecessors, crossed into cheesecake overload instead. Nothing wrong with some titillation, but when EVERY single female character in the game is dressed like a model wearing a sexy Halloween costume in even the darkest situations, it starts to become funny rather than arousing. Especially when you consider that they're supposed to be professional soldiers.
  • If you get Yuriko-Omega near water, a bug during the beta release would cause Yuriko's voice to revert to that of the default, laser katana-wielding infantryman if she hovered over water. Emphasis on man.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Generally speaking, the Allies have drawn the ire of many players in the online competitive scene due to their abundance of cost-effective units and strategies that can be considered extremely overpowered. There are even instances that a skilled Allied player can defeat an enemy who has a higher economic advantage which tends to question the credibility of the game's balance. Interestingly, though, they also have the highest skill cap and requires intensive microing to utilize their units to their full potential so it can be said why there are much more Soviet and Imperial players online than do Allied players. Here are some examples of their units and support powers that have gained notoriety of being game-breaking:
    • The Simple, yet Awesome Vindicator is a very crucial unit that opens many windows of attacks thanks to their high mobility and very high DPS. Upgrading them with the Advanced Aeronautics upgrade increases their sight range, pools up their health and grants them an additional bomb. The Vindicator complements very well with the Cryocopter, creating a ridiculously broken strategy known as "Cryo Rush" - the latter can freeze up units and structures while the former can drop its bombs on said frozen targets (most preferably harvesters to cripple the enemy's economy). One can also do a "bomb-split* which centers on a well-timed pause to drop a single bomb on a target, making it one of the most cost-effective units in the game.
    • The Cryocopter is considered by many players as the most broken pre-Uprising unit in the game. It's a support unit that freezes enemies causing them to slow down and eventually become completely frozen, allowing them to get destroyed in a single hit. What's even more infuriating is their S.H.R.I.N.K Beam special ability that allows the Cryocopter to reduce an enemy unit's size and greatly weaken its overall capabilities to the point that it becomes useless and easily crushed by smaller vehicles. It can also be used on friendly Prospectors to quickly expand territory, as shrinked units at least get a significant speed boost. Added with the "High Technology" and "Advanced Aeronautics" upgrade protocols and they become even more difficult to destroy unless with a sufficiently massed anti-air group.
    • The Aircraft Carrier is a floating vessel that is capable of launching a squadron of 5 unmanned planes from almost anywhere in the map while remaining out of reach. These planes are relatively hard to take down even with sufficient AA units and defenses and if they are destroyed in battle they can be replenished in an infinite supply. Then there's its special ability called the "Blackout Missile" - a warhead that when deployed will cause structures and vehicles to be disabled within in a *large* radius. Upgrading the carriers with the High Technology upgrade increases the EMP's effects for a longer duration. This ability alone shuts down players many options that they can use to their advantage and leaves them completely exposed to other attacks, much to their frustration.
    • The Cryo weapon support powers (namely: Cryoshot, Cryoblast and Cryogeddon in order) launches an orbital ice beam in an area. While it's relatively dodgeable, the bane of which makes it a source of crying foul from players is how it can freeze many targets and destroy them with only a single hit and this makes it even more effective for use in maps with tight spots and choke points. Many even consider it to be a superweapon more than a normal support power.
    • The Time Bomb support power is extremely powerful. The only way to counter it is to move everything out of its radius. Waiting for the countdown to end will make it explode. Attacking the bomb and managing to reduce its health to 0 makes it explode. Guess what the opponent AI does when it encounters a time bomb. Averted if you have a Chronosphere, Cryo Legionnaires, or a Cryocopter on field, in that case you're able to harmlessly freeze and/or teleport it away.
    • The infamous "Turret Rush" is another strategy devised by taking advantage of the Allied build system - popping up structures in an instant. And this is utilized by placing a hefty investment on Multigunner Turrets. By slowly positioning the Allied MCV in a designated spot while creeping in the enemy base, the player can build as many turrets as he want and this doubles as an effective harassment and offensive force that would keep the enemy player under pressure. Even worse, the player may opt to build more MCV in order to stack up building more turrets, practically ending the game.

  • Uprising brings 4 overpowered Allied units: the Cryo Legionnaire, the Pacifier FAV, the Future Tank X-1, and the Harbinger Gunship.
    • The Cryo Legionnaire is a "heavy" infantry unit that, unlike the single-target Cryocopter, can freeze multiple enemies within the range of its frost cannon. It also has the ability to do a big jump with its boosters to break down frozen targets to bits. Put it in a Multigunner Turret or IFV and they can even turn Kirovs into giant ice cubes. Moreover, it is highly durable, is ironically fast on foot and is also amphibious.
    • The Pacifier FAV is a long-range artillery unit which can be obtained more earlier than the Athena Cannon, is amphibious, can deal an immense amount of damage from a safe distance with their Grand Cannons, can take out infantry with machine guns while on the move and it's also durable, too. All of these huge advantages on a unit for a cost of only $2000.
    • The Future Tank X-1 is probably the apex of this trope. Giant humanoid robots on treads, they have a big respectable health pool, an immense AoE attack, an ability that can turn to shreds any structure in one constant hit (save for the Construction Yard or a Superweapon), they self repair, and it only costs $3000 to produce. It is not unheard for 4 Future Tank units to destroy entire bases by themselves.
    • The shining example is the Harbinger Gunship, a flying bomber that can bomb the crap out of any ground unit, or can slaughter infantry with its machine gun. It has a lot of health and it doesn't need to reload. Combined with an escort of Apollo Fighters, and you basically have the winning hand for just about every challenge.
  • Outside the Allies, there is also the new Japanese Super-Unit, the Giga Fortress. It is a literal unmanned fortress which can deploy from anti-air and anti-water to anti-surface mode. It is slower than a Kirov while flying, but it gets a giant laser beam as its weapon while flying. It deals an immense amount of damage, but it takes a minute to be constructed, costs $6000 (the most out of any other unit in the game), and is extremely susceptible to special anti-air units, such as Yuriko.
  • The Soviet game-breaker however, is much more subtle, and yet arguably the most broken, the Mortar Cycle. It's an artillery unit... that's faster than just about anything you send to chase it. And all you need to start pumping them out is a Barracks and a War Factory, letting Soviet players completely control the early game and likely just win without ever having to tech out of tier 1.
  • In the Imperial Campaign, the Purposely Overpowered Shogun Executioner, a mecha so humongous it doesn't need an anti-air attack because air units just run into it, has a rapidly-recharging area-of-effect ability that destroys absolutely anything on the screen, destroys buildings in one hit, destroys vehicles by stepping on them... and it turns out Tesla weapons heal it (guess which enemy you're fighting when you control it).
  • A minor example can be found in the Soviet Tesla Tanks, mission-only units that cannot be reproduced. They're an overall improvement from their Red Alert 2 counterparts, being more powerful and durable, but an oversight (or intentional design choice) allows them to rack up veterancy points at an astounding rate. It only takes a few vehicle/structure kills for them to quickly become heroic. They'll be your best defense in the final Soviet mission.
• With high enough starting resources and on maps with many ore mines, the Empire can pump out more than half a dozen refineries in the time it takes for the enemy to set up a single out, the extra resources letting them defend those refineries and essentially starve the enemy out.
• Genius Bonus: "Before the Hallowed Tomb" takes place on the Oki islands. The game map actually matches up with the geography of the real islands, if shrunken down.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • "The Great Bear Trap" campaign has you stop Kirovs being manufactured in converted sports arenas and gyms in Havana. By capturing a Soviet factory and building Terror Drones, you can use their alt-fire to paralyze a just-built Kirov in the arena, ensuring no more Kirovs can be built at that location.
  • An Allied multigunner turret in the Fog of War will display every possible combination of guns it can wield at once.
  • The High Technology Top-Secret Protocol of the Allies resets the cooldown of all affected abilities. It also allows a Cryocopter to shrink a target that has already been shrunk, which does not have much of a practical application (it can only be pulled off once per Cryocopter on cooldown when obtaining the Protocol), but allows players to see hilariously tiny units running incredibly quickly in the battlefield.
• Ham and Cheese: Just about all of the actors. You can tell, however, that this is exactly what the developers wanted: a bunch of well-known and skilled (though hardly A-List) actors competitively hamming it up and Chewing the Scenery to add to the already absurd levels of Camp. The result, as intended, is a game that leaves you laughing your head off even as you mow down thousands.
• Harsher in Hindsight: If you choose to destroy the EA studios in the Los Angeles mission despite the very real threat posed to the space-time continuum, a soldier will claim that "Their products will taint the shelves no more!". A few years later, given EA's reputation among gamers and the EA Los Angeles division shutting down...
• Heartwarming Moments: The Empire of the Rising Sun gets one in the campaign, in contrast to the Chronic Backstabbing Disorder found in the Soviets. When Emperor Yoshiro learns that Japan became a superpower because of the Soviets’ meddling with time travel, he relinquishes his command and reconciles with his son. This is the first time power is transferred willingly and no one dies from the player’s faction on the antagonists’ side of a C&C campaign, which makes it stand out even more.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • One of the allied Engineer's quotes is "I can fix it!"
  • One from the game: the tutorial tells you that all the enemy forces are actually very realistic robots, so you can go ahead and kill them without feeling bad in a painfully bad Never Say "Die" moment. Then it turns out that truly lifelike androids do indeed exist, the American president among them.
  • Cherdenko declares he is escaping to space as it has not been touched by capitalism. In Series Ten of Doctor Who, the Doctor discovers a scheme to make an oxygen monopoly - described as "Capitalism... in space!"
    • In a real life twist on this, after the game's release, a significant chunk of current spaceflight research, development and deployment has since been taken over by for-profit corporations such as Space X and Blue Origin, with many predicting that corporate-owned space transport and interplanetary resource mining operations will be a major industry in the next few decades.
• Low-Tier Letdown: The Imperial Nanoswarm Hive is a bit unwieldy to use, at least compared to the old classics that are the Iron Curtain and Chronosphere. It appears that it's intended to block off groups of enemies and/or break the opponent's army into a smaller more manageable force (like a stasis field essentially), or protect your own base or units from superweapons or other assaults. While it has its utility, it's still not necessarily the ideal support power versus the Iron Curtain and Chronoshift. As a Time Stands Still weapon, its timing and field of effect are a bit imprecise for dividing enemy forces.
• Love to Hate: Premier Cherdenko has literally no redeeming features whatsoever, and by all accounts, should be a Hate Sink.....If it weren't for Tim Curry's deliciously hammy performance making him incredibly amusing to behold in-game.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Emperor Yoshiro's line "You are made of stupid" is a fairly popular forum weapon.
  • I'm escaping to the ONE PLACE THAT HASN'T BEEN CORRUPTED BY CAPITALISM... SPAAAACE!!!. Its memetic quality is only enhanced by the fact that Tim Curry is visibly trying not to laugh as he says the line. The meme gained new life in 2021 following the space flights of billionaires Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos, with many using the clip to reference (or mourn) the loss of capitalism-free space.
• More Popular Replacement: The Allies' naval anti-air unit, the Hydrofoil, is a lot more useful than the Aegis Cruiser of the previous game. The Hydrofoil is generally cheaper and faster, and aircraft has a greater presence in this game. The Hydrofoil also has a weapon jammer, giving it a utility against surface units and the ability to pacify greater threats, making it an effective support unit on the water.
• Narm: Transports have a few lines they say when unloading a unit. In the case of the Multigunner IFV, they play even when the IFV explodes (killing the unit inside).
• Narm Charm: The whole SPACE! bit. It's obvious that Tim Curry is trying so hard not to laugh, but at the same time, it's also what makes the scene really enjoyable, especially if you consider the tone of the game as a whole.
• Replacement Scrappy:
  • Tanya's actress changing from Kari Wührer to Jenny McCarthy. The role of Tanya is completely different from her RA2 incarnation. There's no humor there, nothing which plays to McCarthy's strengths as an actor, just a lot of sneering and one-liners.
  • Tim Curry as Cherdenko. While his performance isn't bad per se, it doesn't have a lot of opportunities to distinguish himself from Josef Stalin, Premier Romanov, or Yuri. It's pretty much a relative bust...apart from the line about outer space.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: The Allied (Assault) Destroyer becomes a lot more useful than it was in the second game. Its main turret is its weapon against submerged enemies, meaning that it cannot be shut down by anti-air weapons. As an amphibious unit that has the secondary ability to act as a durable shield to protect nearby units, the Destroyer gets a lot more mileage as a result.
• Retroactive Recognition: Gina Carano plays the Russian assassin, Natasha Volkova. Those who don't follow her MMA career may recognize her from The Mandalorian.
• Scrappy Mechanic: When playing the campaign cooperatively online, you cannot skip the mid-mission cutscenes, unlike when doing so in solo play. The Allied campaign is full of these, and they tend to be on the longer side, so playing the majority of its missions results in a lot of unnecessary downtime.
• Sequel Difficulty Drop: The base game's campaigns are significantly easier than that of Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars for a few reasons:
  • In Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars, base construction was, for a multitude of reasons, problematic. With the grid-based building system of old being implemented in Red Alert 3 (like in previous, older games), as well as far more generous construction space granted by additional structures, outposts, or simply being free-rein in the case of the Empire of the Rising Sun, this has been swiftly rectified.
  • The campaign mode is designed around supporting two commanders. In single-player, player two is an AI commander who can be given orders whose orders are then directed to their units. Having this commander essentially helps keep the enemy army busy, allowing for more calculated steamrolling tactics from the player, as opposed to the relentless offensives directed at the player's base.
  • Ore mines last a lot longer than Tiberium fields, with the first mines secured in a map lasting for three quarters of a typical mission's run time.
  • An accidental example through competitive game balance patches, unlike in Tiberium Wars where subsequent patches ended up making missions more difficult (such as the GDI mission in Alexandria), the patches in this game would end up making certain aspects of Red Alert 3's campaigns easier, such as reducing the build cost of Assault Destroyers, giving Tsunami Tanks the means of self-repair with their defensive nanites, and even cutting the cost of superweapons in half. The latter really breaks the game's difficult in the player's favor, but after what happened to Tiberium Wars, hardly anyone complains about this gift horse in the mouth. Sadly, these changes wouldn't affect Uprising, a single-player only game.
• Sequel Difficulty Spike: Uprising's campaigns are significantly more difficult than any of the base game's, with even the Easy setting feeling like what was previously Hard. Co-commanders that once drew the enemy's aggro away from you are gone, ore mines provide only a fraction of the resources they did earlier, and the enemy AI tends to be one hell of a lot more aggressive. The prices of Superweapons being cut in half in an update are not applied here, and numerous new and extremely powerful units tend to make your life a living hell, but worst of all are the nasty surprises the game keeps throwing at you almost every time you complete a primary mission objective. The Soviet campaign in particular can feel downright brutal, and that's canonically the first of the four. The others tone it down a bit, but not by much, and they're also subject to some heavily Schizophrenic Difficulty.
• Signature Scene: Cherdenko's "I'm escaping to the ONE place that hasn't been corrupted by capitalism... SPACE!!!" line, due to Tim Curry trying his hardest to not laugh or smile (and failing, as you can audibly hear him stifling his laughter and see him visibly smile) due to the ridiculousness of it and Tim visibly and audibly Corpsing as he says it.
• Tear Jerker:
  • In the midst of the game's campy-ness, Yuriko. Prior to the game, she was allegedly taken from her parents by the Empire, where she then went through god knows how many horrific experiments in Dr. Shiro Shimada's Omega program. Then came the start of her campaign...and it all ends after she made meat puree out of everything that stood in her way, killed both Shimada and her alleged sister Izumi (the former out of revenge and the latter out of self-defense) and she has now has no idea what to do. And her theme song is pretty tear jerking...
• That One Level:
  • One Soviet mission that stands out in Fake Difficulty in the mission at Iceland. You start off with a large sum of credits to build up your base to fend off against the Allied assaults on the two islands. This is short-lived as Krukov will requisition said resources after a period of time. Once the two Allied forward bases are destroyed (or after another large period of time), Cherdenko will order you to eliminate Krukov by destroying his Construction Yard and his personal bunker. If you didn't prepare for this in advance, be prepared for a serious reckoning, as the base is heavily fortified. You may end up spending a lot of time and resources doing this one objective. And after doing so, you'll still need to finish off the Allies and their main base, and they have a Proton Collider fully operational. Knowing this twist ahead of time makes this a fairly breezy mission; not preparing in advance makes it a slog.
  • Mt. Rushmore, for being the most Luck-Based Mission in the entire C&C franchise. The strategy is obvious. The president has gone crazy and if given enough time will drive his limo to a building which will cause you to fail the mission. If he dies the weapon you need to stop from firing fires automatically and you also fail the mission. You may be tempted to use a Cryo Copter to circumvent this physical time limit, but the enemy will deploy Apollo Fighters against it should you do this, and the debris from your lost Cryo Copter may destroy the limo instantly. It's far safer to spam the cryo shot ability to slow him down significantly, but not permanently. The Roosevelt bust isn't the only weaponized face on Mount Rushmore; the limo will activate the other three heads on its destination, requiring a Century Bomber to paradrop an Engineer to capture the appropriate station, which is another time and money sink. And speaking of money, there's little in the way of ore node expansion, which results in serious money starvation (it doesn't help that Warren has some trouble securing the ore nodes/oil derricks near his base, making things more difficult than they reasonably should). The best way to counter this is to send Spy after Spy after Spy into the enemy base, conveniently lacking Attack Dogs, to rob money from the Refineries as well as shut down the base's power to help hammer those numerous anti-air defenses. All the while the enemy will send many attack waves your way. If you were lucky enough to trigger the event where Mirage Tanks become available, a number of them will be put under your control, which can help fend off the weaker attacks. If not, you'll have to field your own. And once the central command is destroyed, the president will make an escape attempt via helicopter. Should you fail to prepare for this, it's game over. The missions only get more difficult from this point forward.
  • Tokyo. You start off with half the ore nodes typical of a mission, and you must hold the line with limited resources. Don't bother attempting to destroy the Imperial forward base outright; there simply isn't enough resources to make this worthwhile. Your initial goal is to hold out until Soviet reinforcements arrive, but they never do. You're on your own. It's at this point that whatever credits you had on hand disappear. After this, the Imperials rub salt in the wound by using their Psionic Decimator to eradicate your entire base, leaving only your Construction Yard intact (and any units you had the foresight to get the hell out of ground zero). You're given the option to have your co-commander teleport to the other side of the map, but it's far better for you to do this yourself. From there, you'll need to eliminate key targets in the various Imperial bases to win the mission. What makes this difficult are both Imperial superweapons being fully operational, the relentlessness of the Imperial armies (especially their navy; you'll want to eradicate their docks first), and Imperial reinforcements spawning from the west. Serious management of surgical air strikes to waste production structures is crucial to winning this final blow against the Empire of the Rising Sun.
  • The penultimate mission in Havana starts off with a bit of infiltration magic. Try not to get run over by Soviet treads as you make your way to the objective, a sports stadium housing Kirov Airships preparing to deliver city-levelling warheads. Should any such Kirov escape the map boundaries, it's game over. Money is once again relatively scarce for the task at hand, with more and more stadiums becoming active, all the while the Soviets not budging an inch and even making numerous counterattacks. Giles focuses more on building a navy to stop any Kirovs from escaping the map borders, rather than securing the ore nodes to the northwest, or making an offensive against the Soviet naval yards (which will produce Dreadnoughts to bombard your bases). Once more, the use of surgical air strikes and anti-air divisions are a must in this level. And you don't even get the usual freebie point to invest in top secret protocols, meaning that you'll have to wait a while before you get the coveted Advanced Aeronautics upgrade.
  • Then there's the final Allied mission in Leningrad, also invoking Guide Dang It!; this is a timed mission, and enemy attacks from the east almost never stop coming. Rushing with the Mirage Tanks provided at the start against the enemy War Factories to the east is pretty much a must lest you get overwhelmed with tank attacks, and every Iron Curtain is heavily defended. It helps to capture one of them for your own, but it's not immediately obvious when they're your primary target. That's not even getting into Krukov's deployment of the Vacuum Imploder and his ambush army of Terror Drones and Apocalypse Tanks.
  • The Imperial Campaign is no stranger to this either. The Odessa mission, of which the first section is a frustratingly difficult Escort Mission. You have to defend a convoy of ten slow and unarmed transports with only a small number of units while the Soviets send waves of units that attack multiple sections of the convoy simultaneously. Kenji's not too particularly helpful here. And the kicker is that the mission is a failure if even a single transport is destroyed.
  • The fourth Imperial mission might be the contender for the most difficult mission in the game, as there's no way of using hindsight to mitigate the difficulty factors in this mission. First off, you start off with next to no credits, which is an absolute middle finger for a mission where you need to build up troops to defend multiple areas from the enemy. There's no way to increase your monetary gains; the four obligatory nodes you start off with and the enemy's two are the only ones on the map, and obviously the enemy isn't at all hampered by this massive Ore drought, fielding plenty of units that include Cryocopters, Apollo Fighters, and later, Aircraft Carriers, all of which act as Demonic Spiders in this mission as you lack a reliable surface to air unit on the water at this point. The enemy also makes liberal use of paratroopers to further scatter your defense squads. And once it's time to take the fight to them, they'll have a truckload of defenses (all of which magically have no power requirements for some reason) that can only be breached safely with Shogun Battleships. And if that wasn't enough, they also set up bases on land if you let their MCV sneak through). Thought you could bend the rules by capturing said Construction Yards and building Hydrofoils of your own? Turns out there's a bug that will automatically revert control back to the enemy before you can even build a Power Plant! The only consolation the mission gives are two sets of reinforcements (they'll have the Fortified Fleet upgrade, but you won't have access to it yourself. Lose these units, and you lose this advantage), the repair drones provided by some of the objectives you need to defend, and having access to the Nanoswarm Hive this early in the campaign.
  • The sixth Imperial mission follows suit. Money is hard to come by without rushing against the enemy's isolated refineries, or looting the local neighborhood and the EA studio. Meanwhile, it seems that the enemy has plenty of funds to send surgical strikes against your base, given their sizable establishment across the map. They even have various scripted attacks coming from offscreen! Their main bases are heavily fortified as well, necessitating the newly-introduced Wave Force Cannon. You may be tempted to use a Sudden Transport to do some scouting, crate gathering, or a classic Engineer rush, but the enemy fields plenty of Attack Dogs in the northern base.
  • Yokohama. Not only does the enemy start off by sending Aircraft Carriers, Century Bombers, and Chronosphering troops into your base, you start out with a badly damaged one, and need to wait for your MCV to get there. And just when you've managed to destroy enough key Allied structures, the Soviets show up to toss four Dreadnoughts at you and keep churning out more (you'll want to position your own units where they spawn to counteract this). And then the A.I.s accuses you of being a cheat for destroying the devices they set up to prevent you from commanding your units. Oh, and it's a Timed Mission as a result. You also lack the free top secret protocol point that you would normally get in a mission, so you'll have to earn enough to get off-map support and/or upgrades (notably the Fortified Fleet upgrade) the hard way. The use of Yuriko, and buying time via the Nanoswarm Hive is absolutely crucial in turning the tide.
  • While the Moscow level in the Imperial campaign also falls under a Breather Level in terms of a steady offensive, defending your base until the Shogun Executioner shows up can be hectic. The enemy is relentless in its attacks against your base. Destroying bridges to prevent a ground assault, capturing a few Soviet bunkers to neutralize some bases, and having a reliable air force to protect the Executioner from air attacks is a must. Don't forget about the potential Kaizo Trap at the end; the Kremlin will deploy several Flak Cannons around it once destroyed, and failing to shoot down the helicopter carrying the time machine is game over.
  • Out of the few campaign missions in Uprising, two missions stand out the most in frustrating difficulty: The first example is the Soviet mission in the Yucatan. It starts off as a series of islands making a puzzle, forcing you to adopt specific strategies with the units provided. Once you manage to get your MCV, you start off with next to no money. Destroying the Prospectors appearing from the edges of the map with Terror Drones is the means of getting the resources to start up a base proper at the start. The big problem with this is that the Ore Mines you're meant to take at the start are separated by the islands and are pretty much impossible to protect against the enemy's Chronosphere and Harbinger Gunship attacks. The only other node near your base proper is too far away and requires expanding via Sputnik. All the while the enemy never relents with their attacks, and you're still starving for money. Going after the bonus objectives and their cash crates don't help much, as they too are defended with a variety of Multigunner Turrets and Spectrum Towers, and two of them are already on the island where the (heavily fortified) base is. It's telling that the next and final mission in the campaign is easier, despite the Sigma Harmonizer being able to freeze your units still, the enemy having access to Future Tanks, and your army being denied the use of an air force until the enemy airbases in the northeast are taken out, because at least in this case, you actually have more ore nodes and oil derricks to make that much needed cash.
  • The Imperial mission on Oki Island is the other contender. After thwarting the enemy assault with captured units, your main goal is to capture all the Observation Posts on the map, and if the enemy manages to destroy the tomb or capture said Observation Posts, it's game over. Ore Nodes are once again far away and on normal difficulty and above, the enemy starts out with two bases. Your nanocores are completely vulnerable to enemy submarine attacks and the enemy will stop at nothing to invade your personal space. It's difficult to advance on the western island as the enemy has plenty of anti-air and coastal defenses.
  • Uprising has many examples in Challenge mode:
    • Dangerous Skies. Vera and Giles team up against you. You don't have much money at all to fight both of them at once.
    • High Seas Duel. You face off against Takara in this aquatic duel. No War Factories or Barracks allowed. Takara rushes a lot with Yari Subs. Have fun!
    • Kill-A-Ton. The entire map is flooded with chemical substance, so light units won't stand a chance. Moskvin constantly attacks with Terror Drones, and his base is extremely fortified with defenses. It's not easy getting past that ramp into his base!
    • Be Quick or Be Dead. The name says it all. Oleg, Takara, and Hill gang up on your like how most commanders do in missions this late. The only consolation prize is that your base starts off with high-tier technology, even providing you with Superweapons you may have not unlocked yet, and they start off with the usual Skirmish basics. You don't get any additional resources to compensate, however, and you'll need to eliminate one or two armies lest they overwhelm you once they catch up. Your hands will hurt after the initial rush.
    • Future Warfare. All three Allied commanders face off against you in your tiny castle base. Giles, the biggest threat, has two bases, hammering yours with Vindicator bombers. The only saving grace are the Future Tanks you start out with. Use them wisely and you can knock out an enemy base before they have a chance to setup.
    • The Motherland. Fight against the three Soviet commanders. With little safety in expanding for resources and a constant barrage of Russian troops it's widely considered to be the hardest challenge in the game.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: EA's approach is bashed by many fans of the classics as they feel the camp themes are overdone and flanderized, too gaga, with the Fanservice being too blatant and that Westwood's RA2 balanced wackiness and seriousness in the right mix. Tone and cutscenes aside, some gameplay changes are not well received, harvest fields are gone and replaced by static mines, now almost a core building inside a base and easy too defend with and adjacent wall, all-in-all hurting gameplay and marauding. The many support powers feel gratuitous and gamey, as many can't really be countered and in practice they are eventually granted no matter what without an in-game reason or decision. The dual mode for units adds petty micromanagement, amphibious buildings and units demean the peculiar importance of sea and Tanya is no longer a brunette. It could have been worse, as Tiberian Twilight really was the nail in the C&C coffin.
• Underused Game Mechanic: One heavily advertised mission in pre-release material was the fifth Soviet mission, where each commander was limited to a selection of units that the other couldn't produce thanks to the Allied Tech Inhibitor, which was (relatively) heavily guarded. The intention is to secure two islands with additional resources that had Crippling Overspecialisation defenses, with one having Spectrum Towers (meant for the player with the Twinblades to clear) and the other having IFVs and Javelin Soldiers (meant for the player with the Barracks and Bullfrog transports to clear). Other missions had similar designated assignments for each player, such as the second Allied mission where while one player controlled Tanya and a group of Spies to infiltrate and sabotage the island Naval Yards and then sink the Dreadnoughts, the other player had a more traditional army to secure an area through brute force up to the point where the aforementioned Dreadnoughts rendered the territory as no-man's land. However, most missions simply had both commanders having access to the same units whenever there was base access which basically devolved them into "fight the enemy who is twice as large to compensate for two players".
• Vindicated by History: Many regard Red Alert 3 as the best EA-developed C&C game after the debacle that was Tiberium Twilight. In some circles, Red Alert 3 was even seen as a cut above Tiberium Wars for having more personality, having many Anti-Frustration Features, keeping the multiplayer nerfs out of the campaign itself, and having the best faction balance in the series, and it had a hell of a competitive scene to back that up.
• Win Back the Crowd: Though this was very obviously the intention of the development team, with open and forthright communication regarding gameplay features via an official forum, a YouTube channel providing weekly updates and player matches, and a considerable amount of time, energy, and effort sunk into the production, the extremely vocal backlash of hardcore fans of Westwood's more serious-in-tone titles effectively ended all chance at continued production of C&C titles. Nowhere was this more apparent than the development and release of Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight, which saw a level of disregard and lack of polish unheard of since Generals, and far more in line with EA's usual treatment of acquired IP.

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