(Title shamelessly stolen from RPS). After a couple of open beta events that focused on the multiplayer skirmish side of things, there’s now a single player demo of R.U.S.E. available on Steam. It’s a rather different prospect to the earlier betas which basically chucked you onto a map with a base and said “bad guys over there, go get ’em!”; the single player demo is highly scripted, leading you through a series of tasks like eliminating enemy air defences and capturing a base while a bunch of NPC units storm around the rest of the map. It’s a much more structured introduction to the game, more or less a tutorial, well worth a look if you weren’t thrilled at the idea of jumping straight in against other human players in the betas.
The demo also includes cutscenes, which I wasn’t entirely convinced by. RTS games seldom have the most engaging and convincing storylines at the best of times, tending towards “Oh no, (aliens/foreigners/creatures from another dimension)! We must fight! Oh wait a minute, it was all a terrible misunderstanding, they’re on our side really and we should fight together against that lot over there who are *really* bad (and have different unit types and thus present a new challenge). Oh, and at some point we’ll have bit of a civil war or mutiny or rebellion ‘cos it’s quite interesting battling your own unit types. And then in a sequel or expansion pack we can find out there’s a more powerful demon/undead/alien force still that we’ll all have to band together against.” As a World War II game RUSE doesn’t exactly have much flexibility in the story, though it’s not slavishly faithful to history if the presence of nuclear artillery is anything to go by (I suspect that might just be an “I Win” button to finish the demo battle). It seems to be trying to work in a narrative about tension within the allied ranks judging by the demo cutscenes involving some attempt at a femme fatale and rather cross army types spouting hackneyed dialogue (in rendered graphics rather than live action, so you don’t even get to enjoy the acting talent and/or breasts of an A-list cast). Still, the story and cutscenes very much secondary compared to the actual battles, which played just as well as the previous betas, so I’ll be grabbing it on release next week.
Sony pushed the demo to my PS3 last week so I had a go on the console. I was really impressed by the game and it’s now ordered. They even made the transition to console without breaking it too much.
It’s also one of the first games for Move, so it’s nice to see an RTS in there at the start. It’ll be interesting to see if motion controls can be as useful as a mouse for play.
I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to take those cutscenes for though before I feel like smashing something.
Interesting; it definitely feels less click-centric than some RTS games, but I still can’t quite imagine using a standard controller for it… Move, though, I reckon could work really well (you got that pre-ordered? Silly question, really…)
Don’t s’pose it’ll play cross-platform, but it could be a bit of a giggle teaming up if it does!
(Oh, and if you can’t skip the cutscenes, I foresee some early move-controller-thrown-through-TV issues…)
I agree with you on the cutscenes. I kind of just sat there wondering who wasted their time making them and why they were wasting my time watching them.
The action was nice and the effects add a lot of realism. Unfortunately I’m not going to buy it as it keeps overloading my graphics card and locking my computer up. Zoso you must have a higher level system than me. Sorry Ruse, I like what you have going on, but it’s not enough to buy a whole new system for.
I hadn’t considered the performance; I have got a fairly beefy system (i7 CPU, 4Gb RAM Radeon 5850) and didn’t have any trouble. The demo does seem to be laying it on a bit thick with all the naval artillery and vast piles of NPC units tarting around the west of the map for no good reason, maybe trying to impress with the scale but a bit of a downer if it’s overloading the graphics though.