Did I have fun playing it? Sure, but then again I also have fun watching Sci-Fi channel original movies. Doesn't mean they're good, nor would I recommend them to someone else unless they want to laugh at how bad it is. I felt the same way with RA3, except that I didn't get many laughs out of it. The storyline, for a start, was completely ridiculous, didn't make sense, and made everything else that happened in the series amount to nothing. There are times when the time machine made sense and worked with the story; Yuri's Revenge and the original Red Alert both handled this mechanic brilliantly. RA3 , on the other hand, was once too many. Now every time they want to make a new game they just have someone pop back in time a few years and change the world. Nothing ever matters, meaning the game has no effect on me. Seriously, with the amount of times it's been used, if the Allies wanted to win they could go back in time to the American Revolution, introduce tech hundreds of years ahead of its time, and maintain technological dominance over the entire world for millennia. Before it was used as a plot device, this time it's used as an excuse.
Second problem is with the ore harvesting. As has been said, in previous games it was vital to the game to have a solid defense around your harvesters, to keep an eye on them, and to make sure you have enough ore in a field to fund your war effort. Now it's been turned in to a fire-and-forget building. If you run out of ore in a mine you're SOL, but you might as well harvest the entire thing because there's no way for it to 'grow' and no reason to save it for later.
While I enjoyed the idea of having a co-op campaign, their way of doing it was annoying as hell. They should have introduced the co-op mechanic as a multiplayer only sort of thing, because my AI buddies were all idiots that did nothing but sit around and steal my money. I ended up killing them myself most levels because it made things easier.
I didn't mind the introduction of the Japanese Empire in to the game as an idea, but I did mind how they did it. Red Alert has traditionally been Soviets vs Allies, and that makes sense. With Yuri's Revenge they threw in an X factor that made things interesting. Yuri was done well; we knew of him from RA2, we knew what he was doing, why he was doing it, and so on. His units were unique and different, but still relatively balanced and logical. The Japanese, on the other hand, were thrown in there almost for no reason. Why, after the timeline changes from before, would they suddenly decide to go to war? And where did they get all that technology when they didn't have it in the last timeline? Since when did the Soviet mind control tech become Japanese mind control? Where did their army come from? All in all, they didn't really make sense and they didn't really fit. Compound that with the disparities in the power of their units; either they were ridiculously weak or ridiculously powerful, there was no balance, and you've got a faction that I didn't really like.
The missions, across the board, were nothing special. In general they were tedious and involved little more than building up the biggest army and rushing them in. There were some variations and exceptions to that, of course, which they didn't do too badly (far better than C&C3 anyway), but even those ones felt long and drawn out, with goals that weren't necessarily fun. The fact that every single unit had a special ability of some sort didn't help things along either; it made everything seem gimmicky, and in order to use it effectively it required much more control than was available. If there were a few units that allowed for secondary modes, it would have been fine. As it was, it didn't really make sense military wise, nor did it make the game any better.
The acting, as always, was campy and mediocre, but the Red Alerts before it had some seriousness in them, along with the fun stuff, that made it seem much more entertaining and realistic. This time around the acting only got worse, and the whole thing was trying so hard to be 'funny' that it ended up being the exact opposite.
To top that shit off, they made Tanya blonde. Who the hell do those people think they are? And why would going back in time change the hair color of someone who was already born by then? Why would going back in time change so much shit that doesn't make sense?
TL;DR: The story was bad, the acting tried too hard to be funny and it wasn't, the Japanese made no sense on any level, the missions were mediocre, their time-travel logic wasn't at all logical, game mechanics that they added were more annoying than beneficial, and in general it was a shoddy EA ripoff of my favorite franchise of all time.
