I grew up with Command and Conquer, and have extremely formative memories around Red Alert, so this game is obviously my jam.

However, I forgot just how fucking hard Tiberian Dawn is. Seriously! Especially Nod. We're talking a good half of the campaign being no-base missions, and the other half getting your dick ripped apart by waves of units that effortlessly squish your poor rifleman beneath their treads.

Red Alert in comparison feels like a much more mature RTS. Westwood learning the lessons of Tiberian Dawn and applying them to craft a directed, textured campaign experience.

The remaster is mostly wonderful, with many small quality-of-life changes, from right-click commands (BOO!!! HERESY!!!) to a jukebox letting you mix and match the original and remastered albums together (hooray!). The graphics are well-done and faithful, and you can always toggle back to the original sprites if desired. The lack of attack-move will definitely trip some people up, as well as the complexity of the basic micro and pretty bad pathfinding, but in my case I find it charming and a fun skill expression.

All this said, and the reason this remaster isn't five stars, is the AI upscale on the old footage is BAD. Like, seriously bad. The water writhes like worms! They could've just blown it up, kept the aspect ratio, and put a CRT filter to smooth it out, but instead we get some of the ugliest cutscene work ever. Barf.

Definitely worth it. I think these games hold up really well - particularly Red Alert - in a genre now overladen with micro-heavy design where every unit has Special Abilities. But even if they didn't, it's clearly a labor of love by a team of people who adore these games and wanted to make them more accessible to the general public.

I hope someday we get a Tiberian Sun / Red Alert 2 remaster, though they definitely do not need it as much as these games did.