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.

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