Command & Conquer™ Remastered Collection — The Covert Operations

This is just a pack of harder maps with no story whatsoever. There is nothing new and no fun special events. All you get is random non-specific CGI videos from the main campaign. A third of the missions are pretty short, a third is about the same as the main game. And in a third so much is stacked against you that on hard with this cheating AI you have to use every trick in the game. Drown the map in sandbags, do blind airstrikes with online maps, roll the RNG to achieve a specific rush, save / load before an airstrike to have two planes. All 1337 speedrunners who hate the sandbags and hate the people who need them to finish the game, are still abusing the scripts AI follows that they’ve memorized, and are blatantly re-rolling.

The NOD missions are puzzly. Ones which are not are just simple skirmishes. Since i’ve played on hard to get the achievements there was no difference between sandbagging the campaign and sandbagging the covert operations. With just how much and how blatantly the AI cheats — that is the correct way to play this game, this is no Red Alert. All AI units are perfect at everything, your demented units do absolutely anything but what you told them to. They just want to die without fighting. Considering that your units’ pathfinding is controlled by the same AI you are playing against — i declare that it does it intentionally. Also the bot just builds inside your base despite not having anything there. Cloak and Dagger is an especially anal mission where you have to build a base inside the enemy’s heavily fortified base. Under siege requires a precision engineer strike to the enemy’s base. NOD Death Squad can be super easy or it can be super hard, depends on if you looked up the scripts in this map. But generally the NOD missions are fine.

Now GDI gets the dirty end of the stick. Because these mission are harder than the NOD ones. You are not baiting the ion cannon with a high value target, you are constantly getting nuked from a facility surrounded by SAMs and light obelisks which are instantly re-built if you destroy them. On Hell’s Fury if you buy choppas they come from the SAM infested north, instead of from the south. You literally lose your money and get nothing. Ground Zero is an ass-ton of RNG pro-1337-kiting with constant save/loading. And then the choppa takes only one out of three saved civilians. The stealth tank is still trash even controlled by the hard AI. It came for my nearly dead forces and still lost.

The dino campaign is the best part.
The first map gives you four trikes to deal with three poor slow dinos.
On the second you are given two choppas so it’s just a question of time and reconnaissance.
Now in the third map you have to kite a lot of very dangerous velocipastors with a very small force. And there are several triggers sending even more hard dinos from behind. You need to kite very hard on the slowest speed.
On the fourth map you can build a universal base with most of the tech. The goal is to kill all the dinos and to defend against the waves of new dinos. You even have a cheaper wall to wall yourself faster.
In the last map you are the dinos. Which sounds extremely fun. The problem is that only raptors and rex can run with any speed and the rest are insufferably infuriatingly slow, have absolutely demented AI and die pretty fast. Flame tanks have extreme amounts of HP for some reason, and it also takes a lot of time to deal with a simple light tank. When the dinos were against you they could easily eat your forces on hard.

To get all the achievements i also had to play all the alternative campaign missions on hard. And damn there are so many duplicates with only a couple of trees moved around. What’s the point in such an illusion of choice that only creates FOMO.