Stalin vs. Martians part 4: It's a Giant Worm!!!

Yep, the title says it all. Mission 4 calls you to activate these pagan altars with sacrifices to activate some sort of Red Magic (I see what you did there) to kill a Giant Worm. I'm not making this stuff up folks. So, as you would guess, we are introduced to a new enemy unit: The Giant Worm. It is indeed giant, and it looks like a worm (or catepillar with some sort of green...glowy thing coming out of its backside...) and if you tell your normal units to shoot at it, they say they have nothing to smash it with. But don't worry, it doesn't attack, it just sort of wanders around all worm like. In fact, I'm not really sure why we are killing this thing, it's definitely more docile then the other Martians and the Soviet Army. Heck, I'd be down with capturing that and offering it as a giant pet for Stalin.

Anyway, like the last mission, this one is pretty straight forward too. You start in a town which immediately comes under siege, after fighting all the Martians off, you move a little bit north to liberate the first altar. Here we run into the first of a number of problems. According to Stalin (and the objectives) you need to activate the altars. It's hinted in the mission briefing that you have to sacrifice the appropriate unit to do this. When you liberate an altar, a group of infantry appear with exclamation points above their heads (I guess they saw Solid Snake or something...) and these are supposed to be your sacrifice. Except, besides the exclamation point, nothing in the game indicates this. So the first time I played the mission, I actually assumed these were normal units given who you had freed and added them to my force to fight.

The second problem you run into is the town. Supposedly, you're supposed to keep it from being overrun and if you aren't careful, it can happen anytime throughout the mission. Or at least I think it can. You see, the second time I played through this mission, I got a random mission fail message, and the only reason I can think of is that the town had been taken.

On my third run through I actually activated all of the altars, and...summoned three large red bear looking things...yep. They're the only units which can damage the giant worm, they are also rather powerful and have obscenely long life bars. I doubt I'll ever get to summon these guys again but hey, it was nice to see them smack down that rather docile Giant Worm.

While I'm on the subject of new units, I might as well mention that the game has handed me Spetzna's. I didn't use them because, frankly, I doubt they are much better then normal infantry and my strategy of spamming tanks is still working pretty well.

At the end of the mission, the game tells you that you've reached intermission and has this music video performed by some of the Martians. I actually skipped this because it was so jumpy, I was worried the game was going to crash (which happened for the first time for me during this last mission). And it did screw me up, after I finished watching it, my mouse cursor disappeared. So I restarted the game and hoped that it auto saved after the last mission (it did, thankfully). Also, I think that cutscene was supposed to signal that you got a promotion or something, I'm not really sure.

I think this was probably my favorite mission yet mostly because of how ridiculous it is. I mean, whenever you have Stalin telling you that your country houses a pagan magic called Red Magic and that the Martians are trying to destroy all the altars with a Giant Worm so you can't use it against them, then you know you're in for a memorable mission.

I'm beginning to think that I've reached the half-way point to this epicly bad game. Which is good to be quite honest. Part 5 will go up after I beat mission 5.