Command & Conquer 3! Red Alert 3! More!
Microsoft has unveiled its latest round of backward-compatibility offerings on Xbox One, and there’s a whole lot of real-time strategy courtesy of Command & Conquer.
More specifically, four C&C titles now have backward-compatibility support, starting with 2007’s Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars and its standalone expansion, Kane’s Wrath, which arrived on Xbox 360 the following year.
“While there’s a certain obnoxiousness in its total refusal to innovate,” said Alec Meer in his 8/10 review of Tiberium Wars in 2007, “in a lot of ways it’s exactly the right real-time strategy game at exactly the right time. After years in the wilderness, RTS is pretty cool again right now, and something as cheerfully straightforward as this is just what’s needed to stop… another plunge into an inaccessibility that turns more casual players off the whole genre.”
Also languishing in a big pool of Xbox One backward compatibility as of today is 2008’s Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3. Here, thanks to some good old-fashioned alternate history shenanigans, three world powers – the Western Allies, the Soviet Union, and the Empire of the Rising Sun – fight it out for global supremacy. Real-time strategy inevitably ensures. Xbox One players can also partake in Red Alert 3’s standalone expansion, Commander’s Challenge.
“When an RTS is as unpredictable as this,” said Quintin Smith in his 8/10 Eurogamer review back in the day, “it becomes less about scheming and resource management and even more about simply reacting, and that’s not going to be to everyone’s taste. That said, everyone loves the sweet taste of co-op, so if you’ve got a friend who’s a fan of [RTS games] Red Alert 3 can and will show you a very good time indeed.”
If you still have the original Xbox 360 discs of any of the above games, you can just shove them in your Xbox One and away you go. Otherwise, all titles (minus Kane’s Wrath, it seems) can be purchased digitally via the Xbox Store – Command and Conquer 3 and Red Alert 3 are £7.49/$7.49 USD, and Commander’s Challenge is £6.75/$9.99 USD.
