The new Japanese faction contains lots of nods to things like anime artwork and designs in their unit visuals and abilities. Units that transform from ground to air vehicles and back again are a major factor in gameplay in the new playable side; if you transform to an air unit you can only take out enemy air vehicles and moving to the ground focuses on ground combat. There's also large anime-style robot units that are made for taking out large structures but are weak in taking on smaller infantry forces.

One of the things that makes playing the Japanese more interesting is that creating buildings in the is a tad more flexible. Instead of being restricted to a certain area around your central base you can basically build structures wherever you want via wheeled vehicles that can move and then turn into structures once they are situated.

In our demo we created a number of transforming units along with some cannons and a couple of mech units against the US forces. We quickly found out that the US has some special weapon units of their own. One in particular fires an ice beam that creates a frozen surface on the unit it targets. This will reduce its hit points to just one. That means that unless the unit thaws out (it takes a few seconds) even one small infrantry unit can take out a massive unit with one shot, causing it to shatter.

We were told that each faction (US, Soviet and Japan) will get a full nine mission single player campaign which means the entire single player experience will consist of 27 missions. The multiplayer beta for Red Alert 3 should be beginning in the very near future, according to the EA rep who helped us with the demo. And the over the top live action cut scenes that were part of the first two titles in the series are heading back as well.

Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3 may be a bit goofy but it looks like the Empire of the Rising Sun faction will be both artistically and thematically similar to the previous US and Soviet factions. Even with just a few minutes of gameplay time with the E3 build we are eagerly wanting more. We expect to get more hands-on time with the title before its scheduled release this fall.