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.

Page 2 of 2 »