Just to point out the Red Alert series wasn't ALWAYS cartoony, the first Red Alert was REALLY gritty and had a downright dirty and industrial aesthetic quality to it right down to the music being really heavy and industrialised in it's composition. Even the cutscenes though campy had some downright cut throat action going on what with Stalin being either poisoned or buried alive to die and the fact that the game was basically an alternate WWII. Red Alert was not cartoony or over the top, it was the closest C&C has been to reality, right down to basing a lot of the tech and units on real world technology and stories/conspiracy theories that were extended, Nikola Tesla's Tesla Coil, the Philadelphia Project and invisibility stuff, even Einstein taking the side of the Allies. It was actually very grounded compared to all the other C&C games.
So my opinions of the game. Visually it's very good, still needs some polish but it's only a beta eh? Obviously it's hard to talk about the sound as 90% of it is recycled from RA2 for the beta but the context dependant music seems a bit schizophrenic at times and will skip back and forth between normal and battle music in an irritating way but generally it's very smooth which is good, I have a feeling that each piece of ordinary music has specific contextual music for that track as the basic structure of the music tracks is very similar meaning they always transition very well, so hopefully this will be carried through to the full game with more music variety.
Gameplay wise it's a bit here and there, I like the way each side builds, expands and techs up in a unique way but I feel the Allies drew the really short straw on this one.
As it stands the Allies have to buy clearance to the higher units from the construction yard, this means that on the up side getting mid-range tech is quicker and cheaper than for the other sides, but it takes longer and costs more to get their top-tier tech.
Furthermore to expend the allies need to use prospectors or MCVs, anything built in the range of or buy the resulting outpost or construction yard is subject to that structures clearance level. So if you were to use a prospector to create a forward base you would have to buy clearance for that prospector so that any war factories, barracks etc. built in it's build radius have access to the higher level tech meaning the Allies have to buy access to the tech at every base it isn't a blanket unlock for all thing. This makes the Allies the most immobile side and puts them at a disadvantage when setting up on forward positions.
Also in the case of the Allies they are sorely lacking in the ground based units, they've never had the best tanks but they completely lack any armour that can deal with infantry effectively, the closest they have is an IFV packed with a peacekeeper. Their tanks are all non-amphibious except for their harvestor and APC which brings us on to another sore point. They are short on infantry, in terms of combat capable infantry they have the peacekeeper and the javelin soldier and that's it, they've lost the rocketeer and the chrono legionnaire. In Red Alert 2 while they had a strong naval presence the real strength of the allies was in the infantry and their variety.
In terms of strategy the ability to build on water is a plus, it adds a whole new dimension to the game, but one dimension in which it is lacking is the radar. In the previous games (not counting C&C3) you needed to build a radar structure, this often gave access to some low-mid level tech and activated the radar. Since C&C3 the requirement to build a radar structure has been totally removed, this does two things, firstly it removes the problem of losing your radar. In RA2 and generals it was a big strategic thing to hit someone's radar, you don't realise how blind you are until it's gone, and secondly it makes a low power situation a minor inconvenience that merely disables defences super weapons and slows construction and unit production. Before hand it was a big problem while losing your super weapon and defences isn't minor in itself it is compared to being blinded. Knocking out someone's power so they had no radar made it easier to move units in from various positions to take them by surprise, the fog of war as opposed to shroud does change things slightly in regards to the importance of radar but it is still a valuable tool for monitoring the battlefield.
Speaking of monitoring the battlefield why can I see enemy subs before they surfaced? Why do that, for the previous two games subs have been invisible until they surfaced, that was their point and now you can see them but not target them meaning they're no longer a surprise attack unit.
My final complaint this far is the menus, they seem highly broken with some text missing and the online lobbies and server browser are put to shame by Quake 3, though this is typical of a lot of PC EA games server browsers, BF2s was pants, I'm sure BF2142's was also pants and C&C's have been pants all the way back to Tiberian Sun when nobody knew any better.
So in closing it's a lot of fun but it still needs a lot of polish the menus in particular, and I defiantly feel the Allies have drawn the short straw in terms of land based units, their navy kick *** but I'm sure a lot of it especially the dolphins will get nerfed before release.
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