R.U.S.E. - There's a good game hidden here somewhere.

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When you first see R.U.S.E., you could be forgiven for thinking it’s just another RTS set in the Second World War. Because, ultimately, it is. And there are plenty of those. However, R.U.S.E. is actually a little different.

The overall gameplay is as you’d expect. You have a limited number of available units, comprising infantry, armour and air. There are some nice features, such as adding actual line of sight to units, meaning if your tank can’t see that anti-tank gun hiding in that town square, it’s not going to know about it until the first shell slams into its soft rear armour. Sneak attacks do a lot more damage, incidentally. Units on foot (and some motorised units) can enter woods to hide from enemy attack, meaning that standard infantrymen, when stacked up in trees either side of a chokepoint road can be a stupidly effective anti-tank defence.

However, it’s the ruses of the game’s title that really stand out. These are area-specific (each map is separated into arbitrary sections, visible when you scroll out as far as possible) effects which include radio silence (units are invisible to the enemy until they actually SEE them - normally you’re aware there’s something there, but not what it is), spies (identify all units and their movements for a set time), and even false offensives to draw the enemy off the scent. Used well, these really make the difference between defeat and victory.

I first became aware of this game during the closed beta I managed to get onto. Only a few maps were available, but all the countries were playable. As it was multiplayer only, and I’m usually one for single player campaigns (with notable exceptions - TF2 and L4D spring to mind), I didn’t play it a huge amount, but I could certainly see how much fun it was. The various countries excelled at different things: the USSR had excellent tanks, artillery and infantry, but their air support left a little to be desired. The British had brilliant tanks and air support, but their artillery was atrocious and their infantry underpowered. Each country was modelled after their actual performance in the war, as opposed to each faction having their own version of the same thing - a medium tank doesn’t necessarily equal a medium tank, as the T34 proved.

However, once the game was actually released, I rushed to buy it, looking forward greatly to the single player. This is where the love story ends. The campaign is... a little stilted. Sure, being thrown into the action means you get beaten a lot. But being led so gradually into it that you don’t even get your first ruse for about three missions? That’s a bit much. The pivotal function of the game is the ability to mislead the enemy, so why the hell do you need to explain the basic, not-that-different-to-every-other-RTS controls in so much detail? It’s not that hard to work out. Once you realise that some units can lay in ambush due to being able to travel on different terrain to others, you’ve pretty much got it down.

The game also touts its revolutionary touch-screen functionality, which, I must admit, would be a nice feature if you had a huge, table-mounted touch screen for multiple people to play on. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Very few people have touch-screen monitors. So few that they’re effectively non-existent. Kinda makes me think they could have spent that time fleshing out the campaign a little more, instead of coding for a difficult to make function that no-one’s going to use.

Credit where credit’s due, though - the multiplayer is still as great as it was in the beta. They’ve cleared out the bugs and glitches that sometimes made for a difficult game, and the servers are in much better shape. Often was the time that a match would have to be called off because one of the players had a ping of several hundred, making it impossible for the game to progress. I have yet to experience that since launch.

So, in short - brilliant multiplayer, but not really worth it if you want the single player only. This is not for those who are forever alone.

Till next time,

CSquared

http://gamegrill.blogspot.com/

Keywords: R.U.S.E., RUSE, WW2, PC, PS3, Xbox 360, 360, RTS