Command & Conquer Red Alert 3 Premier Edition Music Disc

I was sitting on an armored Apocalypse tank and smoking «Kazbek», admiring the beautiful sunset over my motherland’s seas. Gee, these new tanks pure shit! You can’t rest on the slippery side more than for one smoke, your ass starts aching. Anyway, soon we should have taken seats in a stinky «ZIL» and gone watching over the outskirts of Vladivostok.

Since the time our motherland made a jump in time, almost all the sheep dogs, with which we used to while away the time in patrol, were replaced by cyborg bears. I don’t know, what design office made them, but those guys were definitely lost their minds. You can’t talk with that bear, you can’t even stroke it. I pulled up my АК-47 and loaded «Soviet March» into my iPod (a Paris trophy) and I was on my way to a rally point, when suddenly the Red Alert swished the coast of a peaceful sea haven...

Lieutenant Vasiliy Gorbunov, 2nd armored division , 17th October


The soundtrack of Red Alert 3 appeared to be an extremely interesting thing to prepare. The very fact that the founder of the musical style of a series was involved in the work at the last stage of the creation of the disc, already gives criticism chance to raze to the ground the work due to the obvious fanboyishness. Though people sitting here writing reviews are not fanboys, they still remember the sad experience of C&C 3 too well. Thus, three people worked above the sound track: Frank Klepacki, James Hannigan & Timothy Wynn. And if the first one doesn’t need any presentation at all, the last two should be presented to public. Hannigan was previously noted for an outstanding work in a cosmosim masterpiece Freelancer and great work on Republic: The Revolution. Wynn is famous by a middling work for a console WarHawk (yes, there was music in fact). This trio raised remarkable and not-so-remarkable tracks, but they surely raised a whole bunch of them.

Soviet March opens the album, and it is meant to be the main theme of a renewed Red Alert. One wouldn’t have the heart to call it a march (you won’t be able to march in step with it), but it’s more than worthy to be the main theme. The mix of tsarist days symphonies and soviet marches together with a strong chorus (like the State Ensemble of the Bolshoi Theatre of USSR chorus) makes you strain from the grandeur of the nonexistent motherland. Strikes to the marrow. Right after the symphonic march comes an industrial one – a real march, which is also a real theme of the series - Hell March 3. If someone actually gained strength during this downtime, that will be this march (unlike the game itself). Klepacki’s orchestral fun and frolic left a most pleasant impression on HM3. Here are the heaviest reefs, the famous phrase, the electronic passages, the strong chorus, underlining the unbelievable drive and epos of the composition.

Generally, the theme – the best for playing, the best on the disc. I should mention the giant amount of remakes in the album. The first two HM and a nice second revision of Grinder could actually give it a chance of being appreciated... But let’s move on. The most interesting of non-Klepacki’s themes, besides “Soviet march” - the music, written for the Japanese. In fact, all Japanese tracks tend to be leisurely electronic and chip-tunic, which is unexpressed in general eclecticism. Gets you worked up, yeah, but strongly resembles music of the house”Ordos” from Emperor. But generally it’s fine.

All the remaining compositions pull the disc down, since a couple of tracks are clearly not enough. All the ambient to-the-picture trash and in-game melodies hardly can be listened to separately from the game, and even in the game they don’t create the drive and the atmosphere needed. It’s simply the wrong tempo. And give it a thought – ambient and Red Alert series... Yeah, I feel sad, too.

To sum up, we can tell we’ve been cheated. Makings of a brilliant symphonic are suppressed without a trace with a hammered-out ambient. And five good tracks out of forty-four just won’t do, especially taking to consideration that part of them are remakes of good old themes. Who is to blame? We’ll never hear the answer to this question. I would have never told of RA, that it’s a “seven”. But I have to now.

P.S. KGB will come for me in a minute. Farewell, comrades!