Part 4: MISSION 3: Vacationing In Siberia

God bless you, Gorby the Barbarian, for bringing mustard and Twinkies to the people of the U.S.S.R.



MISSION 3: Vacationing In Siberia

With the tyranny of Mission 2 behind us, it's time to forge ahead! What horrors and/or forced wackiness awaits our forces?



Well, that's...tame. I suppose some of those sentences contain elements that may or may not be found humorous by certain individuals. Hum.

Oh, and spoiler alert because I might forget to mention it later: You don't have to kill a single goddamned tree in this mission. Thanks for nothing, Stalin.



Can you find the terrible Photoshops before losing interest? Then you have a greater attention span than I!



Oh boy, more liberation! We haven't done that since...our very last objective.



At least we get new toys. You can see the T-70s on the right side of my tank column. Smaller and greener than the others. Will they be worth a damn? Only one way to find out!



There's a better look at 'em. The models are pretty nice, so I assume they were stolen from another game. Maybe I'm being unfair to the devs with that one, but after Mission 2,



I roll my new tanks about 3 meters (that's 3.28 yards in SOVIET) forward and trigger a wave of sprinkles. My armor engages with machine guns, so they should work at least as well as my basic tanks...right?



I spy a plagiarist in the corner of the map, next to some anti-Soviet crop propaganda (cropaganda?). Since I'm not going to be needing my infantry for anything, lemme show you something interesting.



Like your tanks, infantry have 2 different modes of attack. Unlike tanks, this is dependent on what they're fighting. Against sprinkles, they open up with gunfire, but with larger aliens like oooOOOoooh here, they huck grenades.

It takes them FOREVER to throw, however. I'm pretty sure they modeled pulling the pin and everything. This gives assholes like three-eyes here enough time to kill fully half of my men before he gets taken down. Infantry sucks.



Leaving my infantry and expensive tanks behind, I group up my basic and new tanks and roll up on a...Tiberium field? As I gun down more sprinkles, some of the crystals break, but I don't notice them doing anything. A lot of the scenery like saplings and telephone poles can be knocked down by tanks. It's a nice touch. If only they had paid that kind of attention to other details, like TELLING YOU WHAT SHIT DOES.



Speaking of which, let's find out what our other new toy Rage does. I stand in agreement with the poster who thought it increased damage.



Well, guess what? It does NOTHING. No flashing lights, no funny sound effects, no noticeable change in any units whatsoever. I clicked it three times, and all it did was make 150 KremlinKash disappear. Let me repeat that: IT DOES NOTHING

Okay, I lied. It filled ME with rage, so I guess it's not a total loss.



Not content with liberating a mere village, our glorious leader now sends us to liberate a whole town. Good thing liberation doesn't cover such trivial details as giant atomic-fire-belching aliens standing on the hill behind your house.



I order my tanks to assemble in the center of town...and this happens. See those little green circles on the ground? Those are the points that my tanks are moving to. Somehow, the game stretched out these circles into a line, and whenever I order my tanks somewhere, they fan out in this retarded pattern. Clicking and dragging rotates the pattern, but doesn't re-organize it. What the hell are you doing to me, game?



This is where we're heading, and I gotta be honest, I was really excited about encountering new scenery. With a game like this, the bar doesn't get set low, it gets buried.



Due to the fog of war, I didn't see any of these guys until my tanks were rolling DOWN the hill there. That's right, I couldn't spot them from the TOP of the hill...I had to be descending, right into their kill zone.



I also couldn't see these guys until I rounded that steep hill. That's more understandable, but I'm still mad about the one before, so FUCK YOU GAME



Oh, and there are sprinkles too, but my new technique of "rock back & forth until dead" remains unstoppable.



I think there were over a dozen tri-ocular jerkoffs on this tiny stretch of road, which whittled my tank column down to four. Rich in Communism and giving no fucks, I pressed on.



A squad of sprinkles backed up by some Hufflepuffs is perhaps the least threatening combination of enemies possible. The sprinkles run way out of range of the blue morons, who are easily picked off at my leisure.

Also, you can see here I picked up a +30% Speed token. Other powerups include Attack, Defense, and Full Health. That last one can keep units alive WAAAAAY longer than they normally should last, if you can get the right one to roll over it in time.



Sprinkles plus green guys is the worst. I can only hit the green guy with my main guns if my tanks are sitting still, which lets the candies eat through my armor as if it were tooth enamel. Engaging the sprinkles first tends to be the better bet, because you can dodge three-eye's shots as you juke back and forth.



Since the narrow street makes it harder to dodge shots, I pull back out of town and mow down the angry dots.



My retreat leaves a shitload of cash and tokens behind. I fail to collect most of them in their allotted 3 seconds of existence, but it's not like I need the money at this point.



Enjoy your liberty, town! The next goal is to get across a bridge, which is not-code for "we're waiting to blow up all of your units on the other side of this thing."



I kill this tree for no other reason than it is there. As I mentioned, nothing in this mission has anything to do with the briefing...that's part of its trashy charm, right? Right?



I can't imagine this'll end well.



Nope. Sprinkles, green guys, and worst of all, fire-puffing space elephants that actually attack! The level designer must've blown his creative load on the bridge sequence before downing another bottle of rubbing alcohol and tackling the earlier parts.



I try to take down as many green bastards as I can, but four tanks on a bridge too far only go so...far.



Let's talk about our new tanks, shall we? From my observations, they are functionally identical to the basic tank. However, they seem to do a bit less damage, fire a bit faster, and take a few more hits. Their defining feature is that they are FAST AS HELL. Seriously, it took me like 20 seconds to get this group back to the bridge. All that for only 10 funbux more than the normal tanks means I'm never using anything else ever again.



My new tanks tear ass across the bridge and lay utter waste to the alien forces. Suck on that, imperialist* invaders!

*citation needed



Now that I've secured the far side of the bridge, it's time to lib-wha?

Well...that's probably a fancy way of saying liberate. I can't imagine the devs want to shake things up now, so expect to kill more aliens in the vicinity of a church-looking thing.



Another hill, with more goddamned sprinkles and green guys. I guess hills are important for one thing...they totally fuck your field of view. Also, I think green guys can shoot through them. It's hard to tell, because their projectiles are visible only half of the time.

...After all that, I will be shocked if there are QA testers in the credits.



We crest the accursed hill and engage more hidden green guys and...hey, what's that?



A NEW CHALLENGER APPEARS



A NEW CHALLENGER RIPOFF APPEARS

I had trouble getting a clear shot of these guys because they're a bit spastic, but they're red meatball-things with horns and a giant eyeball in their mouth. Their attack?



They shoot the eyeball, which then explodes. How did the developers come up with such a unique foe?



Who cares? They die, and I win.



This happens about half the time I try to screencap the "MISSION COMPLETE" text because it stays on screen for all of one second. Thanks for nothing, game.

So, in case you lost track, I only used tanks in this mission, and I only had to purchase reinforcements once. Compared to Mission 2, this was a minor distraction. Juking back and forth is, so far, completely flawless.

How long can our luck hold out?



NEXT TIME ON STALIN VS. MARTIANS: