You can now play Command and Conquer: Red Alert 2, if you’re willing to risk your boss’s wrath and jump through a few hoops at the same time. It won’t feature the fantastically smarmy Tim Curry chewing on scenery (that’s Red Alert 2), but the game’s bonkers cutscenes and excellent real-time strategy gameplay will at least let you while away a boring Friday at the office.
The game is playable on all major browsers, but the folks behind the project reckon you should avoid Firefox if you’d prefer decent performance for your skiving-off time. That leaves Chrome, Edge, and Safari — there’s even support for mobile browsers, though the controls might be a little fiddly at that size.
Red Alert, the boss is coming
It’s a little telling that the best things to come out of the Command and Conquer franchise in recent years (decades?) have been new ways to play the original games. The folks at Chrono Divide haven’t even taken the ‘let’s remaster this game’ step. They’ve just made it entirely playable on modern platforms, wherever you are. But there is a slight catch.
You’ll still have to host Red Alert 2‘s game files to get the game working. Thankfully, a link to these is provided when you’re setting up your browser for some retro RTS action. Turns out, they’re really easy to get hold of. Whether Electronic Arts will throw a spanner in the works isn’t known (Westwood certainly isn’t going to say a thing), but it’ll be fun while it lasts.
The browser-based RTS is still in beta, but should be fully functional on most platforms that exceed the Intel Atom Z3700+/4GB RAM/ Intel HD GPU requirements. And, if your boss isn’t too much of a dick, there’s the potential for inter-workstation games, with Red Alert 2‘s multiplayer fully supported. So are mods, in case vanilla CnC: RE2 doesn’t do it for you anymore. It’s not like you were doing anything important at work today, were you?
