The fourth campaign, Yuriko, is pure fan service, and puts the player in control of Red Alert’s familiar telekinetic schoolgirl. These missions don’t actually play like a conventional Red Alert game at all – if anything, they’re more like a dungeon dwelling action RPG than an RTS. There are no bases to build or resources to mine, only Yuriko and her devastating psionic powers. Ironically, Yuriko Omega provides Uprising’s most satisfying challenge, as she cuts a swathe through the enemy’s ranks – using her abilities to smash one gigantic mecha into another, or cause a platoon of troops to explode in a shower of gore. Sadly, Yuriko’s three missions are all too brief – if anything, her campaign could have been expanded into an eminently playable spin-off game of its own.

Single player missions aside, Uprising features the series’ emblematic skirmish mode as well as what EA call the ‘Commander’s Challenge’, a series of increasingly difficult missions with various random complications like giant bears or falling debris.

All this new content is perfectly decent of course, and the unit designs, explosions and environmental effects are as detailed and distinctive as ever, but with the mystifying exclusion of any kind of online play, the dozen-or-so new units and thirty maps seem rather pointless – it won’t take veterans long to battle their way through the four campaigns.

The obligatory Red Alert humour can also fall a little flat at times. EA has chosen to up the scantily-clad model quotient exponentially, resulting in a clutch of overlong cutscenes that look more like a porn movie with all the naughty bits trimmed out. B picture stalwart Malcolm McDowell delivers his lines seemingly in a trance and Holly Valance turns in a performance that is somehow worse than her acting in the woeful Dead or Alive movie.

The repetition of Uprising’s self-consciously zany speech samples is similarly grating – a Soviet conscript’s drawl of ‘I’ll kill them like watermelons’ is funny the first few times, but the novelty doesn’t take long to wear off.

Ultimately, Uprising’s existence is something of a mystery. Its single player campaigns (created due to the demands of Red Alert fans, according to EA) make for a diverting – though not particularly tactical – few hours, but the inability to play any of its new missions with a friend, or use any of its additional units in a multiplayer battle will severely limit its appeal.

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