Did you read the title to this review? Good, now you don't need to buy the official RA strategy guide - that's all the good advice it offers, other than absurdly obvious things like "Don't kill the friendly medic" and "Avoid the flame turrets".If the whole guide was full of examples like those two, it might be worth buying for amusement factor. But no. Those 240 pages aren't just awful, they're uncreatively awful. The mission walkthroughs give you no specific strategies and are indistinguishable except for the maps.
This book also has pep talk. "Give 'em hell, commander comrade comrade commander." This is a STRATEGY GUIDE for crying out loud! I don't want to hear about how we need to give 110% and there's no I in Team. But then, since there isn't much offered in the way of good tactics, maybe this guide could be seen as a self help book rather than a guide.
The list of units and structures was copied from the instruction manual, unchanged except for:
-the addition of unit stats that would be useful except they're incomplete
-the insertion of the phrase "eh, comrade?" in key places
-larger font and spacing
Okay, the maps. The maps aren't bad (I don't see why people want them in color; it would be pretty, sure, but would make the book cost three times as much and wouldn't help any). I liked the maps because I got to see what was going on in all those areas you aren't able to explore (aha! so there was a bunch of snow there!) and because I got to see the computer's starting forces (not that that's useful, I just liked to see them). They also had some use in forming my own strategies.
This is the worst strategy guide I ever read. The best strategy guide I ever read, somewhat ironically, is the unofficial RA guide, superior to this one in every respect except for the maps.
