Those Soviets are up to their old tricks again. After suffering through a debilitating war against the Allies in the first two Command & Conquer: Red Alert games, the Red Army has had enough. Using a time machine, the Soviets go back in time and eliminate Albert Einstein and all the future weapons that were created as a result of his scientific breakthroughs. And it works. In the alternate future, the Soviets have an advantage over the Allies, only an unexpected thing happens. While the Soviets and Allies have been engaged in war over the years, the Empire of Japan has been free to develop its military might unimpeded, and now there’s a new threat to Mother Russia from the east. To understand the plight of the Soviets, we sat down with Red Alert 3 executive producer Chris Corry. Here’s what he had to say.

The plot is a mash-up of old fairy tales and self-referential modern fantasy. You play Melvin, a contemporary teen who finds himself teleported into a magic land after looking for refuge from a rainstorm in a creepy candle shop. Before you can even tell the bucktoothed proprietor that he should really look into getting his Bugs Bunny choppers capped, you’re off to the cursed town of Tallen to discover your magical destiny in the company of a smart-aleck elf named Fiona (the game’s original European subtitle was Power to the Elves). Your entire quest is framed as a search for your magical identity through a series of challenges that test your fears and work to free Tallen from a curse that makes the townspeople do strange, Vegas-y things at night such as drink heavily and gamble. So the five chapters come with names like Fear of Failure, Fear of Death, and Fear of Fear. In reality, though, the plot structure is pretty much adventure-game generic. Instead of any deep moral choices, you actually just run a lot of errands, lug piles of junk all over the landscape, do favors to win friends, and so forth. This is an old-fashioned “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” collection of odd jobs that play out exactly as they have in adventure games since the mid-1980s.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that–in most cases, at least. However, in Everlight, your tasks are choppy and lacking in sensible progression. Sometimes you have to make huge leaps in logic to figure out what to do next, given that characters don’t provide enough tips to push you in the right direction. You can probably blame this on a poor translation from the original German. The dialogue is a touch off, which makes it hard to get the gist of some conversations. It also ruins whatever sense of humor might have been possessed by the original game; every attempt at a joke here turns into one of those cricket-chirping silences that make you feel embarrassed for the guy who wrote this dreck. The only somewhat amusing facet of the entire game is Fiona, the supposedly friendly elf (actually a Tinker Bell-type fairy, not the conventional Legolas-style interpretation of the forest-dwellers with pointy ears). In reality, she hates everybody in Tallen and laces her conversations with liberal uses of words such as “idiot” and “moron.” With a little more nastiness, she would have been legitimately funny.

This awkwardness even messes up the basic plot structure. Every chapter seems to include a couple of moments in which one quest somehow morphs into another with virtually no explanation, such as how your hunt to find out who is shooting at Walt’s house at night turns into a hunt to find out what magic-shop owner Farida and hermit Kalas are doing after dark. This is also one of those games in which you can’t guess your way to solving puzzles. For example, an early quest forces you to cut the seal off of an old document so you can slip it into a pile and have it notarized by a town elder. You’ve already grabbed a pair of scissors, and you can deduce your objective by simply reading the document and then observing how the wing-nut elder is sealing and signing letters without looking at them. But you still can’t play medieval cut-and-paste until you talk to Fiona and have her flat-out tell you what to do. What’s the technical word for this style of game design again? Ah, yes. “Argh!”

At least you can occasionally dodge these frustrating situations by turning to the in-game help system. Fiona takes notes along the way that serve as a list of quests in progress, and you can either consult or interact with this list by clicking on three magic candles for tips. Twenty candles are available for use in the entire game at the default difficulty level, so you can’t lean on them every time you get stuck, but they’re still quite useful. The first candle gives you a nudge-nudge, wink-wink clue, the second provides more-detailed instructions, and the third polishes everything off by rounding out all of the advice into a walkthrough of the current conundrum. It’s a pretty elegant system that is the best thing about the game, especially when you consider how necessary it is due to the translation wonkiness and how the story is aimed at preteens.

The Guild 2: Venice is a stand-alone expansion that purports to be all about the legendary sinking city best known for its canals and singing gondoliers, but it’s actually just a third-rate face-lift of its predecessors. The only noteworthy additions to this economic simulation are a couple of new professions, four new scenarios depicting Venice and its neighbors on the Adriatic Sea, and some horrific bugs. So even if you’re hungry for more merchant-on-merchant action after the original game and its Pirates of the High Seas add-on, you don’t need to take this Venetian holiday.

If you played any prior Guild 2 games, you’ll find the gameplay here very familiar. You once more sign on as one of four medieval classes and work at making money, building RPG-like skills, and going forth and procreating to establish a multigenerational dynasty. That description makes the game sound a little more far-ranging than it actually is, however. Instead of a role-playing medieval adventure, you’re actually playing a merchant in a humdrum real-time economic sim. The patron, craftsman, scholar, and rogue classes may allow you to take on a wide range of occupations that stretch all the way from priest to highwayman, but each deals with nearly identical buy-and-sell busywork. As a priest, for instance, you set up a church and make your daily bread by selling holy water and the sacrament. On the other end of the moral spectrum as a rogue, you do pretty much the same thing, although you take a shortcut to wealth by stealing items that you later sell. All of the lines of work here seem just about identical, with similar goals that mainly revolve around buying raw materials and turning them into finished goods dished out for a profit. Basically, you’re playing a medieval workshop boss, with all of the thrills and chills that such a job entails.

In Far Cry 2’s chaotic world of mercenaries, gunrunners, and armed militias, you’ll find yourself dropped into a dizzying web of shady clients and paper-thin alliances. All manner of names and faces are introduced during the course of the storyline, but the real star isn’t anyone brandishing a smuggled weapon in search of blood diamonds; it’s the daunting and awe-inspiring 50-square kilometers of African landscape that make up the game’s open-world setting. Aside from providing the opportunity to soak up an amazing sunset, Far Cry 2’s free-roaming terrain brilliantly harmonizes with the first-person combat. The diverse landscape and myriad environmental factors work alongside a wide assortment of weaponry to give you tremendous freedom to approach each mission. Combined with solid multiplayer, Far Cry 2’s sheer breadth of action provides you with plenty of reason to stay lost in the African wilderness despite an underwhelming plot and the occasional sense of tedium in navigating from one location to another on the gargantuan map.