R.U.S.E. Beta Impressions

Now that the beta is reaching its end, I thought it was about time I offered my opinions on R.U.S.E. Ubisoft’s real-time strategy promises, as its title hints, to integrate deception and fraud into the traditional RTS template. In terms of its broad structure, this is a conventional RTS. Bases are built, units are produced and victory is achieved through the destruction of the enemy. Overlaid on this template are the titular ruses, special abilities employed during a battle. Some might boost your units movement speed or make enemy units more likely to retreat. Mixed in with these more direct enhancements are the deceptive ruses. In the eyes of your enemy, buildings can disappear and light infantry can become a column of tanks.

Outside of the myriad of special abilities, R.U.S.E. is a solid if unremarkable strategy game. Although set in the second world war, R.U.S.E. doesn’t differentiate the allied and axis powers. R.U.S.E achieves balance by making each side’s abilities identical rather than giving them contrasting strengths and weaknesses. There’s nothing wrong with this approach to a game’s mechanics, after all it works in Chess. However, it does makes me worry about how the lack of variety will affect the games longevity.

I couldn’t shake the feeling throughout my time with R.U.S.E. that by not playing it with friends, I wasn’t getting the best out of it. This came down to a lack of feedback as to how effective the deceptive ruses are. I found myself wondering if I was misdirecting the enemy or just wasting an opportunity to use a simpler ability with a more obvious effect. For example, one ruse directs a large group of fake units to an area of the map. Due to the way R.U.S.E. deals with fog of war, the enemy can’t easily tell if your units are really there. It was hard to tell if my opponent had fallen for my tricks or not.

After a while, I just stopped using the deceptive ruses and I noticed that my opponents weren’t using them either. We would both fall back to using straightforward buffs that made our units faster or fearless. I still enjoyed myself but the one central mechanic that sets R.U.S.E. apart wasn’t being exploited. R.U.S.E. became, in the space of a mere beta test, a bog-standard RTS.

Stripped of its distinguishing features I found R.U.S.E. had a number of other flaws. Matches seemed to resolve themselves in the first five minutes based on a combination of luck and memorisation of build orders. Either I pumped out the right handful of units and secured all the maps resources or my opponent did. I didn’t feel like there was any real back-and-forth to the game.

There’s also a lot of downtime during a given game of R.U.S.E. The movement speeds for all land-based units are incredibly slow and resources take a long time to build up. It’s an obvious ploy to encourage players to think before committing their forces. It makes sense in the context of the game as it is intended to be played. When the game devolves into a standard strategy game it just makes everything feel unnecessarily slow and awkward.

As you may have guessed, I wasn’t terribly impressed by R.U.S.E. during my time in the beta. It has the feeling of a fascinating idea let down by the introduction of actual human beings. Its most interesting and innovative features were subsumed by a competitive community that just wanted to win. In truth I was probably ‘playing it the wrong way’. Unfortunately, that was the only way to win.