I’m really excited about a console game.  It’s set in World War 2.  I’m sick of World War 2.  It has some sort of connection to Tom Clancy– that’s a minus.  The art direction looks bland, and the story hasn’t even showed up yet.

But if you check out this 8 minute gameplay vid, you can quickly tell that the design team has done a ton of heavy lifting.  (And maybe the UI team?  Do game studios even get to have a UI team?)  Let’s check out the elements:

• Positional + pitch/yaw controls.  Hey, I’m a console player, I know how to point at things in 3D– I bought Halo, remember?
• Quick zoom.  This is great for increasing precision and resolution.
• Floating cursor.  Lots of RTS games have gone with a crosshair in the middle of the screen– this floating, snap to nearest unit cursor looks a lot more useful.  Instead of trying to snap the view to a unit (see: Halo– and yes I’m contradicting point 1), snap the cursor and leave the view free.
• Tons of visualization.  Watch the player find a destination for the units.  You’ll see not only the destination, but the position and orientation of each unit when they arrive.  You can also see enemy paths, iconic views when you zoom out, and lots more UI goodness.

I’m not even going into the unit- and base-building modes, which display at least as much work, or the strategic map views, or the special abilities.  R.U.S.E. displays far, far more UI attention and innovation than almost any game I’ve seen.

I don’t see a real multi-select solution– perhaps they’ve designed a lower population cap, squad-based game to work around this.  The pace of gameplay is also short of something like Starcraft.  I’m still really excited: R.U.S.E. is clearly the most serious attempt at RTS on the console shown yet.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 10th, 2009 at 7:09 am and is filed under Game Discussion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.