RUSE Beta- My Thoughts

ibex333

Diamond Member
Mar 26, 2005
4,094
123
106
Well, I played the Beta during this weekend and I must say that the game is actually pretty good. I feels more like World in Conflict than any other strategy game out there, but it has enough differences to set it apart.

What I really like is that the build menu is very well designed and easily accessable. The game has you focusing on overall strategy, and on the whole map instead of forcing you to micromanage individual units. This is awesome, because I hate games like Warcraft 3 where, clicking on "starfall" or another hero ability a split second faster than your opponent in battle can decide the whole battle in your favor within mere seconds. (this is not strategy IMHO)

You can select various times to fight in, starting from early WWI and ending with late WWII. There is plenty of races.. French, Italians, Germans, Soviet Union(yeah, baby!), USA, Brits, and one or two more I think....

The maps are pretty big, and you can zoom wayyy out to see the whole map from a battlemap point of view. Really awesome...

The most important element are off course the "RUSES" - abilities which you can use to give various buffs to your armies or debuffs to the enemy. On top of that you can use abilities such "radio silence" to "cloak" your units moving through a sector for nasty flanking maneuvers or a "spy" to reveal enemy positions and allow your artillery to pound them into oblivion. You can also hide certain units in woods and mount surprise attacks which give a huge bonus to damage. Infantry actually matters in this game when used properly, being able to destroy even the best tanks with "surprise attacks". At the same time, RUSE is one of those strategy games where developers actually understand that aside from the main cannon all tanks ACTUALY HAVE A MACHINE GUN as well! When infantry is caught in the open it has absolutely no chance against tanks unless used en masse as it will be moved down in mere seconds.

There is a healthy amount of units and buildings, and everything seems to work very nicely.
There are off course certain issues with the game, but I wont go into that right now. The only thing I will mention is that I think that Ruses such as fake planes and fake infantry are silly, because you can make wooden tanks, and buildings, but how the hell do you fool the enemy with wooden soldiers? Especially ones that move? And wooden planes? (let's not talk about the British Mosquito, or the gliders because those were not fake planes)

Also the arty feels a little owerpowered, because I literally raped people online one after another, again and again, using the same arty strategy. There were very few who could put up a fight against my unstoppable arty and even those eventually folded under the constant barrage onslaught... 12 consecutive wins? Either I'm that good, or other people suck, or arty is indeed overpowered.

Overall, I'd say this game got potential, and it should be at least as good as WIC, although I only played the WIC beta, never tried the full version.
 

konakona

Diamond Member
May 6, 2004
6,285
1
0
sounds interesting, congrats on your winning streak!
I was kinda curious about the game, can't play till my 5850 gets here though.
Never had a chance to play WIC either, been without a GPU for too long :(
 

Vdubchaos

Lifer
Nov 11, 2009
10,408
10
0
I like the Beta, it's pretty cool.

It's pretty simple to learn, but it would be nice to have a tutorial to get to know all the little details that matter.

LOTS of people are complaining about Ubisoft new game policy...
 

Genx87

Lifer
Apr 8, 2002
41,091
513
126
Arty did account for about 65% of casualties in WWII hehe. But imo these games never get it right. Even World in Conflict had on map arty along with off map. Arty should be off map and have a delay when it will show up.

I do like the game however. I may pick it up on Steam when it is released.
 

xCxStylex

Senior member
Apr 6, 2003
710
0
0
Without reading the long winded PDF information, I tried playing a single game against the computer and had no idea what I was doing. I'll stick to SC2 for RTSs x_x

BTW, this is available for anyone to try on steam for another 2-3 weeks
 

Maximilian

Lifer
Feb 8, 2004
12,604
15
81
Hmm i dunno, it dosent really do anything that CoH dosent do better, but its nice to see some new RTS anyway. I think this is mainly aimed at the people who liked world in conflict, i got into WiC for a bit when it was new but then never got back into it due to the CoH expansion and me really taking to CoH etc.

Although on the plus side... it worked! and it made me want to play more than 1 game. Which most recent betas/demos have not :p
 

destrekor

Lifer
Nov 18, 2005
28,799
359
126
Arty did account for about 65% of casualties in WWII hehe. But imo these games never get it right. Even World in Conflict had on map arty along with off map. Arty should be off map and have a delay when it will show up.

I do like the game however. I may pick it up on Steam when it is released.

I haven't tried this yet, but am definitely going to have to after finals this week.

With that said...

There is a reason Artillery is nicknamed "King of Battle" and Infantry is "Queen of Battle".

You can't win without either piece, nor can you win with only either of those two.
Also because artillery in real life kicks major ass, so it's only fair.
artillery is the military's god-mode. :p Can't beat it unless you have your own, or with planes, and that's where ADA came in.

Wars fought in towns where you can't/not-allowed-to destroy the buildings is a terrible idea.