The production design is of exceptional quality. The cut-scenes, in general, are among the best the franchise have seen. Corbin does great as a Texan/Southern general, Wise makes a good president, and Kier *rocks* as Yuri. The performances are quite good(for being intentionally campy), and all the actors seem well-cast. They knew exactly what they were doing, and took the time to get it right. before every mission, you get a briefing, and not a single one of them feel as if they were done in a hurry(as they did to varying extent on some of the previous ones). Sometimes, though, the objectives are simply "eliminate enemy presence", which, whilst making rather good sense in a game about a war, is something of a cliché within the genre of RTS. The level design is great, and several missions are quite interesting. In Westwood's defense, all the missions make good sense, they're nicely introduced and explained, and heck, they even all take place at actual locations(complete with famous landmarks). This also means, however, that the game moves through the only twelve missions per side really quickly. The slowest unit moves at a pace that feels fast compared to the other games, and the music yet again gets the adrenaline flowing(complete with a "HM2", a new, unfortunately shorter, version of the excellent track from the first game, which, again, is in the intro as well as on both sides' play-list). Right from the awesome intro, a great mix of story-telling and action, to the first several missions, and, really, through to the very end, the game is very fast and action-packed. in fact, one of the first things that I noticed about this, compared to the preceding games of the series, was the high pace. It also heightens the pace, knowing that. after each successfully completed mission, you'll be told how long it took you, and the par time, and if you did better than it, you'll get a positive statement, based on that, which does wonders for both ego and re-playability(of the player and the game, respectively). An interesting new addition was the "par time". The game is actually considerably easier to get into than one would think, considering the camp. Personally, I didn't really care for the humor, but that's my subjective opinion. Every character, every line spoken, everything, campy.
What Westwood did with this sequel was not only admit the camp, but flaunt it. The first Red Alert, admittedly, has some of this camp quality. It's difficult to make a game that's both entertaining and has a compelling story, and many efforts wind up with silly-sounding expositionary dialog and characters going out of character. Quite a few games are unintentionally campy.
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