Rush for Berlin Review

I’ve played a lot of World War II real-time strategy games and unfortunately most of them have been mediocre at best. Crippled by bugs or questionable design decisions, these games have all done their part to drag down the WWII RTS sub-genre on their way to obscurity. It’s because of this that each new WWII RTS that comes by my desk elicits the same cold, clammy sweat as I imagine would accompany a notice from the draft board. And now here we have Rush for Berlin, a game remarkable not for being remarkable, but for actually being enjoyable. While not without issues of its own, its tactics-focused, war movie style approach to RTS gaming work well enough to make it worth a look from strategy fans.

The play in Rush for Berlin is centered on four campaigns: Russian, American/British, French, and German – the latter campaign being a bit unusual in that it is set in an alternate timeline in which Hitler was successfully assassinated in 1944. The missions are set during some of the major conflicts of World War II, but the game does not try to recreate historic battles or set you down on a map it calls “Stalingrad” and then leave you to the base-building and resource-gathering activities of your typical RTS. Instead Rush for Berlin features large and very detailed maps that are unique to each battle and a wide variety of mission objectives. You will be tasked with capturing factories and then defending them from explosives-packing engineers, lighting fires to guide tanks through swampland, and capturing a lighthouse to use as a beacon for naval bombardment … and all of these are just some of the things that you’ll need to in the first few opening missions. These types of objectives really give the game a strong war movie vibe, making the missions feel more like episodic adventures than brutal and deadly military clashes.

In addition to the primary objectives, each mission will have one or more optional objectives and even a secret objective or two. Only the primary objectives are required to complete a mission, but the rating and medals that you receive afterwards will depend on your completion of the optional and secret objectives, as well as standard goals such as killing the enemy leader or taking minimal casualties. This is designed to give the missions a degree of replayability – they are heavily scripted so you might not otherwise have any desire to play through them again. Also, your performance will determine how many units you can carry over into the next mission and since your units can gain rank and benefit from experience this is a pretty important bonus. Some maps feature factories or army camps that will let the owner produce tanks or infantry using points generated by controlling objectives on the map, but in other battles you’ll have to make due with your starting forces.

Speaking of units, the game features a nice mix of units for each army including infantry, armor, and support units such as artillery or supply trucks. The infantry units are for the most part controlled as squads so you won’t have to command each individual soldier on the field of battle. Many units also have special abilities which add some interesting elements to the gameplay but move things away from reality a bit. Snipers that you can post in buildings are no surprise, but officers that can boost troop morale by giving them vodka in the middle of a firefight or dogs that can plant bombs on enemy units are certainly more fanciful. Even some of the more realistic special abilities such as infantry’s ability to place magnetic mines on tanks take on a Hollywood feel as you watch an infantry squad fling a cloud of magnetic frisbees at a tank and see the tank explode in a spectacular fireball.

This all makes for some fun gameplay, but the game has a few issues that can be frustrating at times and prevent it from reaching its full potential. The first is that the AI is pretty spotty. Enemies rely more on trickery and fast and deadly response times than on sound tactics. Maps have plenty of enemies lying in wait for your troops and their detection range is better than that of your troops. It’s not uncommon to watch a series of explosions take out your tanks without any idea as to where the fire came from. At other times you’ll happen upon the enemy but before your troops can react or you can click on the enemy units with an attack order, deadly accurate fire from the enemy will decimate half of your troops. The other edge of the AI sword in the game is pathfinding. Your troops simply can not move long distances on their own. If you click on a distant spot you’ll almost always find that your units have taken a couple of steps and then simply stopped. Needless to say this makes it extremely difficult to bring troops up from the rear while trying to manage a firefight on the frontlines.

The game also has a few intermittent bugs that can be annoying. Sometimes it seems that a unit or two will drop out of a group or that a group won’t respond when you press its key. Also, the special attack button for units doesn’t always respond right away, which leaves you frantically hitting it when you need it the most.

While I’m on the subject of frustration, I have to mention that the game uses the obnoxious StarForce copy protection software. StarForce installs itself on your computer, forces you to reboot after doing so, and then sits around in your computer’s memory even when you’re not playing the game. When you do play the game, StarForce must first perform a lengthy disk verification before the game will even launch. Once the game is launched it then does a serial key validation. It’s obnoxious to make legitimate owners of the game to go through all of this each and every time they try to play a game for which they paid good money.

On the multiplayer front, the game supports your usual RTS modes of play but also adds two new ones to the mix. RISK (Race-Intensive Strategic Kombat) plays like the single player game except that multiple players are racing to accomplish the objectives. RUSH (Relentlessly Utilized Score Hunt) has players trying to accomplish randomly assigned objectives such as destroying all enemy units. Multiplayer is enjoyable when you can find opponents, but as of this writing there aren’t a lot of people online. This will probably change as more people pick up the game, though.

Rush for Berlin is not groundbreaking or a game for the ages, but it doesn’t have to be those things to be fun. If you’re a strategy fan and you can put up with a few annoyances, you’ll find yourself having a good time with the game.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 79%.  Rush for Berlin is like a real-time strategy version of an old war movie.