R.U.S.E. is the new World War 2 RTS from Ubisoft, developed by Eugen Systems who previously developed the attractive but ultimately fleeting Art of War games a few years back.

The main concept of the game is in the name – you use ‘ruses’ to trick your opponents into believing false information. This includes everything from decoy units and buildings to swapping over their intel so they believe your tiny scout tank is actually a heavy unit.

We spent some time playing R.U.S.E. online via the Steam beta. Currently the beta only allows ranked matches on a limited number of maps, although the full game will feature a campaign mode and various extra features.

One thing that immediately struck us about R.U.S.E. was that it looks nothing like any World War 2 game we’ve ever played. If you didn’t take note of the units themselves and simply admired the graphical style, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were playing a game set in modern times.

Gone are the browns, greys and sepia tones that are used in most war games. Everything looks bold and modern. Your team’s colour highlights all of your main buildings and supply depots, which makes for a pretty stylish looking battlefield.

And a battlefield is exactly what R.U.S.E. is going for. The map spills off at the edges to a blurred background of a command room, giving us an impression of being general moving units on a board. It’s a pretty unique design.

You can of course zoom in and watch units blow themselves to pieces with lovely eye candy all you like, but as with most RTS games doing so leaves you at a major tactical disadvantage, so we spent most of our time playing zoomed a fair distance out.

Typical RTS mechanics apply as far as units and resource gathering goes. You capture supply points which slowly feed money back to your main base where you construct a variety of different units.

The main resource in the game is money, and it’s refreshing to see a game that deals in nice, bold, simple numbers. Even the most expensive buildings and units in the game don’t top more than $100, and you can get a good tank for around $50.

Clearly this isn’t a game for the base building resource gathering hardcore crowd.

Once you’ve got money rolling in, you can start building. You can build every building from the game right at the start, and with the exception of a few upgrades available at a prototype factory, there’s no dealing with tech trees for units either.

This leaves you open to develop any strategy you like, which makes for a refreshing change and increasing the pace of the early game.

Once you’ve built up some forces and a solid economy, you can start planning your attack. Simple unit rushes are made difficult by the games ruse mechanics as you can never trust what you actually see on the screen.

After playing hundreds of RTS games where ‘intelligence’ is simply a case of of the other players activities you can see, it took us quite some time – and a few lost battles - before we trained ourselves not to take the map for granted.

Of course, just as the enemy can mess up your strategy by producing a fleet of dummy tanks or swapping around his light/heavy unit identification, you can do the same to him.  

Some ruse cards are used a lot more than others, the ‘blitz’ card in particular speeds up your units – and therefore your economy –and was used by both us and our opponents for the majority of the game.

The ruse system works well enough to push a bit of strategy into a game, especially as the games last a handy 25 minutes, but it doesn’t really change the genre much, other than making it easier to trick people.

We’ve been playing deceptive tricks and double handed manevoures on our enemies in RTS games since the days of Dune 2, so all the cards really do is make it easier to pull those things off, rather than introduce something new.

The games interface is a minimal affair. There are hotkeys for just about everything you’ll need and despite being obviously designed for console players with big, shiny buttons and large text, it works quite well.

The controls are a little awkward. Scrolling the screen resets the angle of the camera so you’re constantly trying to readjust the view. If there was an option to stop this, we couldn’t find it.

Overall, playing R.U.S.E. was an enjoyable if unremarkable experience. The games simplicity and speed of battles will appeal to console gamers with less experience with RTS games and the ruse system does it job well.

R.U.S.E. is out next year for the PC, 360 and PS3.