The map is designed to look a little like what WWII generals supposedly had in their war rooms to keep track of their forces (at least from all the World War II movies we have seen). The difference is that you can zoom in and out of the map and make it look more like a standard RTS game. As we mentioned the big design switch is that not only can you see your troops but what activities your opponents are doing on the other side of the map.

Of course what you see and what your enemy is actually doing could be two entirely different things. This is where the R.U.S,.E. abilities come in. While you can build buildings and units in the good old fashioned way, there are also options to build dummy units and structures to throw off your opponent. There are also other R.U.S.E. abilities that can impose radio silence on a specific sector of the map. That move cloaks your activities from the enemy for a certain amount of time. Other special abilities can cause your units to move faster or even fight to the death if need be. Naturally, all of these abilities can be used by your enemies.

You gain money to build new units and structures in two ways; one by building structures that automatically generate funds at a slow pace and the other through collecting money at points along fixed supply lines. The latter is more vulnerable to attack, but at the same time, you gain money faster. The units themselves, at least in the multiplayer beta, are fairly standards stuff. Infantry, tanks of various sizes, aircraft, and gun emplacements can call be created and used. Some, but not all, can be upgraded to more powerful levels.

However, this is definitely not a game where you simply create a bunch of tanks and try to overwhelm your enemy. Thanks to the R.U.S.E. abilities, you might charge into what you think is a large tank column only to find that all of the enemy "tanks" are wooden decoys. Meanwhile, your opponent might have tank killer units under radio silence getting ready to hit your sector. All of this means that you and your opponent will be trying to fight a defensive battle. Cloaking your real troops while making dummy ones for the enemy to see on the map is the way to play this game.

Graphically, the multiplayer beta for R.U.S.E. is not going to blow you over with advanced features. It's solid stuff, but nothing spectacular. In fact, some of the unit animations still need a little work. There are some nice touches such as animated arrows that show where units are being deployed. The user interface is pretty simple to operate with graphical icons that open to show more options on the left side of the screen. It reminds us a little of opening up a file folder in an OS. This should make playing the game easy even for RTS novices. While we don't have the correct hardware to try this aspect out, R.U.S.E. is supposed to support the multi-touch features that are native to Microsoft's Windows 7 operating system. The UI is clearly intended to make that kind of support easy to implement and we are definitely interested in trying it out for ourselves at some point.

Ubisoft has already stated that the first beta build for the game will be limited in content, but that there are plans to add more factions, maps and multiplayer modes as the beta continues into next year. Based on our brief time this weekend with this first build, R.U.S.E. lives up to its hype in terms of its design features but is definitely not as graphically intense as, say, the Company of Heroes games. However, the biggest issue of any RTS game is balance. As the beta continues Eugen and Ubisoft will have to make sure that aspect of the game is solid. Currently R.U.S.E. is scheduled for release in the very crowded first quarter 2010 time frame.