Sometimes the price is so good you have to write an article about it. That’s the case with the Command & Conquer remastered collection (opens in new tab) now on Steam, which you can pick up for a ridiculous $2.99 / £2.69 until the deal expires on January 23. Enough for hell march (opens in new tab) itself, if you ask me.
The C&C Remastered Collection is a nice combination of two classic strategy games: Red Alert 1 and Tiberian Dawn. Now neither of them are the best entries in their respective series (that would be Red Alert 2 and Tiberian Sun), but they’re still oldies with plenty to love, and they’ve planted many of the seeds that would do come to fruition in later games. They’re also packed with the cheesy FMV goodness that continues to define Command & Conquer to this day, even though we haven’t had a new entry in a while.
The remaster turns the spiky blocks of pixels that were those games when they came out in the 90s into a smooth and parsable game that you can actually play on all your latest 4K, 144hz whirligigs. However, you can always go back to the old graphics with the click of a button, if you’re the nostalgic type.
For my money, the remaster is the best way to play these games today, but it’s not perfect. Unfortunately, the developers couldn’t get their hands on the original footage for those cutscenes when they were making the remaster, so they had to rely on AI scaling (opens in new tab) to turn the compressed, fuzzy videos that came with the original game into something you can tolerate on modern monitors. It looks fine for the most part, even if characters like Josef Stalin do occasionally look like they’ve been through a bunch of Photoshop filter passes. Then again, I think that’s quite appropriate (opens in new tab).
We were big fans of the C&C Remastered Collection when it came out. In a piece that was published when the remasters came out (opens in new tab), Rick Lane reflected that “Command & Conquer may be an old game, but it’s not a clunky game,” and that the “simple yet propulsive mechanics and intense, fast-paced missions” were refreshing at a time when strategy games demand you make one kind of second career of. You can’t do much better for three bucks.