Ruse

I don't think I've ever been this excited about a real-time strategy game. A screenie:



Be sure to check out this YouTube video. It's worth it. Please note that this video is from a previous version of the game; it looks even better now that it's closer to release than when this video was made.

So, what is Ruse? Simply put, Ruse is a WWII RTS. Oh NOES! Not another one! But there's a twist. Ruse takes cues from the history of the war, allowing you (and your opponent) to use deception, such as dummy units, fear propaganda, and other tricks to coerce your enemy (or you) into, for example, attacking areas of the map that are no threat at all. Other abilities include radio silence and the ability to reveal the orders being given to enemy units. These abilities have a time limit, so planning ahead is essential, but the core of your battle strategies will revolve around misinformation and strategic deception. This is most certainly not a "twitch" RTS.

The heart and soul of Ruse is its interface, which was apparently constructed from the ground up to be used on a touchscreen display, such as Microsoft Surface. This is not in any way a necessity, though; playing the game on a standard monitor is very easy and the controls behave exactly as one would expect. The interface shown in the screenie above is not the "minimal" interface view; that's how it looks through the entire game. This allows you to focus on the action on the ground, and is much, much less distracting than the interface used in, say, a "Command & Conquer" title.

The game is played on a war room's strategy table, and allows you to zoom from that view (you can actually see the war room around you in that view, even as the battle plays out on the table) all the way down to battlefield level, sun, blue sky, and clouds included. This inclusion of a seemingly-gratuitous point of view has the counterintuitive effect of actually increasing the game's immersion; during a battle, you actually feel as though you're directing a war, rather than playing a game. Nice touch, that.

Another thing to note is the game's graphics engine. Ruse is, simply put, gorgeous, with a level of detail from terrain and buildings that I wasn't expecting and highly realistic smoke, fire, and explosion effects. During the soon-to-end (according to Steam, 1.2 days from now as of this writing) public beta/free weekend- a prerelease version of the game, mind you- I was able to run Ruse fairly smoothly at its highest possible settings in 1920x1080 resolution. This will not be typical, as I'm running Ruse in Win7 64-bit using two video cards and a quad-core processor, but at its highest settings Ruse is a real gem. I would expect nothing less from a game that claims to render nearly a billion polys per map (not a typo). It takes a lot for a game to visually impress me these days- call me jaded- but Ruse does that in spades.

Ruse will be released in September of this year, and I'm putting it on my (very short) must-have list. If you like RTS games even a little bit, Ruse is definitely worth a look.