Posted: 09/17/10

First teased as a revolutionary war game you control with your fingertips, the enigmatic R.U.S.E. has finally emerged as a seemingly-ordinary RTS for the PC and consoles, with optional Move support for the PS3. Can Ubisoft's next step in the strategy genre outwit your expectations?

One of R.U.S.E.'s wisest ploys was keeping its mission-to-mission narrative on the light side, as what little story you do get isn't very good. Rife with bad dialogue and even worse character stereotypes, R.U.S.E. tells the tale of rival generals Joe Sheridan and Erich von Richter as they attempt to gain their respective footholds in World War II Europe. It's the kind of generic war story you'd expect, mixed in with some Scooby Doo mystery for good measure: there's a spy named Prometheus in your ranks, who may or may not be one of the advisors constantly by your side. Bland and altogether uninspired, R.U.S.E.'s story never quite comes close to the epic magnitude of its battles. It's a good thing that they comprise only a small fraction of the whole.

R.U.S.E. is a strategy game where outmaneuvering your opponents with the right counter units is just as important as picking the right type of deception for the job. This is where the eponymous ruse comes in: over the course of each match, you're given what essentially equate to power-ups that temporarily grant various tactical advantages, like spy intel, decoy armies, and the ability to move faster across the map. You'll figure out when to use each ruse and how through the game's multitude of campaign and multiplayer scenarios.

The first stop for fresh-faced generals is the single-player campaign, a linear set of 20-plus missions designed to acclimate you to the game's library of units and ruses. Armies are boiled down to their essential parts and pitted against one another in an intricate game of tic-tac-toe: tanks destroy infantrymen, anti-tank guns obliterate tanks, and infantrymen crush anti-tank guns. Furthering the rock-paper-scissors analogy, there are also other units and structures to take into account, like artillery, bunkers, and planes, with special tactical considerations like surprise ambushes adding wrinkles to the formula.

The missions do well at showing how each of these cogs work together in R.U.S.E.'s grand war machine, putting you in various strained situations requiring the full use of your army and resources. The pace of play is smart and strategic, albeit a little slow by today's rush-obsessed RTS standards. Combined with the crafty use of ruses, the game presents an interesting play on unit balance and deception that gives it a distinct flavor.

Outside of the campaign, the operations mode hosts challenge scenarios that you can take on alone or with friends. Battle mode offers streamlined skirmishes against A.I. opponents with selectable behaviors, while multiplayer takes the fight to other humans online in either ranked or unranked matches across a generous spread of maps. Lacking some modes and a map editor on the PC though, R.U.S.E.'s package is a bit modest compared to others on the market.

With its strong emphasis on counter units and tricks, R.U.S.E. is a game that definitely rewards strategy when it's due. Sniffing out hidden units in a forest or peering down on a secret encampment from the nose of a recon plane can definitely turn the tide of a match, so it's up to you to deploy the right composition of units and structures given the amount of information at your disposal.

Orchestrating the movement, production, and actions of your army with the PlayStation 3 Move is a surprisingly smooth and intuitive feat; selecting groups of units is as easy as holding down a trigger, while twisting, zooming, and panning the camera are done via specific wand gestures. Commands to issue unit, building, and ruse orders are neatly piled onto a cross-bar menu, and you can set ghostly waypoints to keep track of where things are set to end up. Standard console controls offer a manageable, albeit far less convenient setup that will definitely slow your productivity; a mouse and keyboard, on the other hand, give you the best control of the lot, but not by much compared to the Move.

Being a game of broad military tactics versus the dexterous management of each individual unit, R.U.S.E.'s steady, unhurried pace may seem alienating to those who've honed their six-pool micro skills, but is certainly no less of a game for it. The flow of combat may be simple but the schemes behind them are not. It may be slightly different than what you're used to, but if the idea of outplaying opponents with preparation over agility sounds appealing, then R.U.S.E. is definitely up to the task.

It won't win you over with its plain vistas and unremarkable style, but if there's anything R.U.S.E.'s graphics accomplish, it's a terrific sense of scale. When displaying skirmishes from afar, the camera pulls back to reveal the battle as viewed from a table-top map, completing the ambience with the hushed din of radio transmissions and war room chatter. Pushing in, units dynamically shift in size and grouping order until you're neck deep on the front lines, surrounded by the blaring sound of bullets firing and artillery shells sailing. Barring some occasional pop-up, the seamless transition between these two extremes is executed with pleasing results. The comic-style cutaways to events transpiring elsewhere on the battlefield are also a nice touch.

The story cutscenes are also well produced, even in spite of a few trips to the uncanny valley. It's just a shame that the hammy voice acting and lackluster script don't stack up.

R.U.S.E. succeeds as a solid RTS with a fun focus on deceit, even if it's a little more conventional than we were hoping for. If strategy, scheming, and using every trick in the book sounds better than the status quo, then this is one strategy game worth the consideration.

Reviewed on Sony PlayStation 3.



Release Date:
PC, PS3, Xbox 360
Real-Time, Strategy

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