This leaked on early Friday. I remember the trailer from a year or so ago, but didnt realize it was near release. Ubisoft (at least to me) didnt do a good job a letting me know it was coming. RUSE is an RTS based around WWII. If you tried to get me to play a WWII based RTS, I'd pass just based on the overly played out material alone. But RUSE is a new spin on RTS. One I like a lot. It's a fictional story based on spies in WWII and tactics used in several different campaigns. The wars and battles are real but there's characters and fiction instilled for intrigue. It works. The game itself is what has kept me coming back. you control units that range from infantry, tanks, and anti tank weapons, to bombers and full bases. While they use real WWII war machines and terminology, it's really just a clever Paper/Rock/Scissor setup. Ground units kill anti tank. Anti tank kills tank. Tank kills ground. A tad more complicated, but thats the gist. There's also bonuses for positioning. If I have troops in trees they get ambush bonuses and what not. The game eases you into the fray without it getting too overwhelming too quick. You dont even realize that the tutorial levels were tutorial levels because they are so well placed and paced. The game offers RUSEs to do things in war. They're like super war powers. I can make my guys use radio silence, listen in on enemy radio frequencies, or send out spies. They all give different bonuses and last a certain time. Spies show what enemies are lurking out of view, and listening in shows what orders are being made by the oppositions (by showing large arrows to show enemy movement). It works out really well. Learning where and when to use RUSEs can turn the tide. The controls (playing on the 360) is what I was worried about the most. I think there's always been a need for someone to come up with an RTS scheme that will work on a console. I'm not saying RUSE perfected it. I have no doubt that PC experience her will be a better one. But they do a pretty F'n good job. It's simple. A selects a unit. X selects all of the units of that type on the screen. Hold Right Trigger and a circle pops up to select everything in it. You can zoom in and out easily to grab as many or as little of a group you want. Issuing orders is as easy as telling them where to walk or who to attack. Simple but very effective. As you start building bases and managing resources, Y will open the production menu. Here you can use a RUSE or build a unit or building. The right analog stick controls the zoom. This is SUPER important in this game. The scale of the battles is probably the most impressive aspect. you can (in any instant) zoom all the way in to almost a unit-level view to all the way out to see the entire war field. The zones are massive. Ubisoft was very clever how they did it too. The game takes place while generals are strategizing on a large war table. Zooming all the way out looks like a war table with terrain mapping and little chips representing units. Zooming in goes into the war look. But you can do this at will anytime during the game. And it's not preset levels. So you can zoom in and out as much or as little as you need. It's tough to describe how impressive this aspect is without showing it. When something scales as much as RUSE does, it's hard to look amazing (at least on PS3 and 360). I'm sure the PC version will look jaw dropping if you have a 30-core processor with 16GB of DDR5 ram. But RUSE does manage to look pretty damn good. It's hard at times to recognize the enemy unit types. But that's more due to the scale of the battle field and not a graphical limitation. All in all you'll feel like a master war strategist in no time playing RUSE. They bring you in gently and have you facing a lot of very different scenarios. I'm about half way through the game and love every second. I'm not saying this is a StarCraft 2 killer or even that this is the RTS to really make console RTSs shine. But if you wanna play a very cool easy to pick up and play RTS with good depths for the veterans. Give this a try. http://www.gametrailers.com/video/wings-of-r-u-s-e/64791
I'm looking forward to this on the PS3 not only because it looked good, but because it utilizes the Move. Then again, I haven't got around to playing Endwar yet, so who knows when I will get this.
