Command & Conquer Yuri's Revenge Updated Preview

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Ask any Command & Conquer fan, and he or she will tell you that one of the biggest disappointments at this year's E3 was that Westwood's upcoming expansion pack for Red Alert 2, Yuri's Revenge, was nowhere to be found on the show floor. Understandably, Westwood opted to save the resources that would have been spent on creating a playable demo of Yuri's Revenge to ensure that the game releases on schedule later this year. Determined for more information on this promising add-on, however, we recently made the trek down to Westwood's Southern California offices to visit with the Yuri's Revenge development team and get some actual hands-on time with the game.

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For those who haven't read our 2707579original preview of Yuri's Revenge, the game takes place immediately after the final moments of Red Alert 2. The victorious Allies have imprisoned the Soviet leader Romanov in the Tower of London, and his right-hand man, the psychic Yuri, is missing and presumed dead. During the opening credits of this expansion pack, however, Yuri reemerges with an army of mind-controlled warriors who set into place a plan to take over the world by using a network of massive psychic dominators. Almost too late, the Allied forces find out about Yuri's scheme and launch a daring assault on his psychic dominator in San Francisco. In a scene taken directly from The Rock, nearly a dozen Allied harriers zoom by the Golden Gate Bridge on their way to the psychic dominator on Alcatraz, where they're met by a nearly impenetrable wall of lead thrown up by a number of Yuri's new gattling tanks. These powerful armored units manage to destroy every last one of the Allied harriers. Luck, however, is on the Allies' side--the flaming hull of one harrier, destroyed only seconds earlier by a hail of antiaircraft fire, barely misses the psychic dominator but crashes directly into the island's power plant, knocking out power to the rest of Yuri's base and preventing the psychic dominator from activating.

The remainder of the psychic dominators that were scattered across the globe do activate, however, and the entire planet--save for the San Francisco area--falls under Yuri's control. At the beginning of the game, the Allies use San Francisco as the staging grounds to launch a counterattack against Yuri by employing Einstein's time-travel technology to go back in time and make sure the psychic madman meets the same fate that Romanov did at the end of Red Alert 2. The Soviet single-player campaign in Yuri's Revenge is similar to the Allied campaign in that they too want to destroy Yuri as punishment for his betrayal. However, the Soviets are also after the Allies' time-travel technology--that way, they can go back and alter the outcome of the original war from Red Alert 2. There will be seven new single-player missions for both the Allied and Soviet sides, and both campaigns will square off each side against Yuri's brand-new third faction of genetically mutated and mind-controlled soldiers. As an added bonus, you'll be able to play this new side in Yuri's Revenge's multiplayer component, which will include 10 new cooperative maps and a number of new skirmish levels.