But upon this skeleton, Red Alert builds an experience that's more frenetic and more imaginative, as well as being shamelessly ridiculous. Red Alert adopts C&C's skeleton wholesale, including the interstitial cutscenes and the open-ended campaign structure that often lets you choose from a selection of missions.
The game relies heavily on the RTS framework Westwood established with Dune 2 and mastered in Command & Conquer, that effervescent mix of resource-gathering, base-building and fast-paced battles. Naturally, it helps that the foundations of Red Alert were already laid at the outset of its production.