C&C: Red Alert 3 Uprising Preview

Big in Japan

Shockingly though, there’s not just the usual three campaigns featured in Uprising, but a new fourth mission set which should help expand the story a bit more for players and give further insight into Futuretech.

This fourth campaign though unusually doesn’t focus around an actual army – but a specific person, Yuriko.

One of the many new characters introduced to the series in Red alert 3, Yuriko was at first dismissed by fans as just the Imperial version of Tanya. A commando unit which far surpasses the regular infantry and who can level buildings with a single attack, Yuriko would have been overpowered if it weren’t for the fact that there was only one of her.

Quickly though, Yuriko distinguished herself from the likes of Tanya, thanks in equal parts to her Japanese schoolgirl uniform and her unconventional psychic powers that let her shred tanks with mind bullets. Pew! Pew!


In this fourth campaign then, we get a bit of backstory to the ever-undeveloped Yuriko (ED: Eww! Joe!) and explore her backstory more fully, starting with the experiments that were done on her by the Japanese scientists who discovered her.

Playing as Yuriko is decidedly different from playing the other campaigns in the game. You’re playing as a single person – and a scared, unstable girl at that, not some super-Soviet commander. There’s no troops for you to direct, no tanks to rush with and no build queues to manage. You’ve got no resources to gather either – the game is much closer to Diablo 2 than an RTS, something the developers specifically aimed for, in and effort to expand on the Commando Missions that have been a feature of all past C&C games at some level.

All you do have is Yuriko and her burgeoning selection of psychic attacks. On the right hand side of the screen and replacing the radar screen are Yuriko’s visions – messages she receives from her family and hallucinations she has as stumbles closer towards insanity.

At the bottom of the screen is Yuriko’s set of abilities, which get upgraded as she proceeds through the game. The campaign starts off with Yuriko escaping from an underground lab, reading detailed reports on herself as she goes and unlocking further abilities in the process.


Yuriko’s abilities start off small, but they rapidly scale up too. Players have four basic attacks and each one can be upgraded similar to the super-weapons in the main campaign. Yuriko’s basic attack involves picking infantry up and rending them apart with psychic forces (something which is done with increased levels of gore as a further tribute to the characters Japanese horror-film origins), but by the end of the game you can crush whole tanks.

As time goes on, Yuriko’s attacks get larger and more impressive too – by the end of the first level you’ll be bouncing shells back on your enemies and sending out huge psychic shockwaves.

Nor are upgrades the only thing you’ll encounter either – as you work through the levels you’ll have to take advantage of the various healing stations and safe zones that litter the levels. These offer welcome respite from the unending battle that faces Yuriko. Unlike the traditional mission sets where the action comes in waves and you get a chance to engage your enemies as and where you want, the Yuriko campaign is extremely linear and consists mainly of ploughing through hordes of unavoidable enemies.

Sure, that might sound a little bit of an anti-thesis to traditional RTS gameplay, but that's exactly why EA Westwood has limited the Yuriko campaign to just a handful of missions, to stop it getting tiring and annoying for players. The whole thing should be completable in just three or four hours of good gameplay.