Thanks to the killjoys behind the Hague and Geneva Conventions it’s now illegal to win a war by inviting your enemies to sham peace talks then feeding them poisoned danishes. You can’t disguise your tanks as ambulances. Soldiers can’t even use fake arms to pretend to surrender any more. All the furtive fun has been stripped from warfare.
Well, almost all. The noble art of misdirecting a foe with mock attacks and bogus buildings, intercepting and decrypting communications, that’s all still legal, and it’s such shenanigans that are celebrated in this surprisingly fresh, unfailingly entertaining WWII RTS.
Doing something novel with one of strategy gaming’s hoariest themes is a tall order, but Eugen have managed it. In addition to the titular ruses (more on which later) the Parisians blow the cobwebs away with truly massive battlefields. Rolling your mousewheel backwards in this game is like snagging your braces on a V2 rocket. One minute you’re down on the deck amongst ravishing villages, pastures and woods, the next you’re up in the stratosphere viewing entire regions through a veil of wispy cirrus.
Ruse needs the extraordinarily elastic Iriszoom engine because… um… Actually, I’m not sure it needs it at all. Observing battles from church-tower height is lovely but entirely impractical. Most of the time you’ll hover a few thousand feet higher at a level where you can take in all forces,
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