RUSE pulls upon a number of predecessors for gameplay inspiration. We can't really say that the story is inspired, since it's the same World War 2 nonsense that gamers have been playing since the earliest days of gaming, but the gameplay is an entirely different matter. Several gameplay elements see their roots in games that have been well-received by both the press and the public, and others trace their lineage back to Eugen's previous efforts. Either way, this is a game that pulls from so many different places that it ends up being an absolute blast.

The most immediate and easiest comparison to RUSE is Axis & Allies. An incredibly popular and classic board game, Axis & Allies uses two major things that RUSE emulates. The first is unit variety. Axis & Allies has a number of different unit types, such as anti-air, submarines, tanks, and infantry. Each unit type is good against some types of units and bad against others, making a combined-arms assault very important. To top it all off, there's no variety within unit types. There's only one kind of tank, one kind of infantry, one kind of fighter, and so on. RUSE follows this almost to the letter. Axis & Allies also takes place on a map comprised of sectors (much like Risk), and RUSE does the same thing.

The intel-based gameplay, most notably the presence of unidentified units, is something that was first used to great effect in Total Annihilation. Radar (and Sonar, for sea) would provide the player with markers indicating unidentified units on the map. In Total Annihilation, you couldn't tell what kind of units they were, but Supreme Commander changed this up to a format more similar to RUSE's implementation. Units seen by a radar in Supreme Commander show their particular unit icons, which means that you can guess the approximate unit make-up in a certain area. However, this doesn't tell you about the units themselves, so you only know that they are structures, ships, planes, etc. Actual recon of intel that your radar has gathered becomes incredibly important, especially since scouted structures remain visible until they are destroyed. Another element that seems to have made the transition from the Supreme Commander series is the inclusion of strategic zoom, which allows the player to zoom in all the way for a battle, and then zoom all the way out to coordinate forces.

The concept of the RUSE system is similar to the strategic abilities in a number of different games. One of the first games to really do this was Command and Conquer: Red Alert, but it was perfected in Command and Conquer: Generals and Company of Heroes. Strategic abilities are global abilities that can drastically change the course of a battle. These abilities are things such as bombing runs, recon overflights, or boosts for the fighting strength of your units. RUSE appears to take this one step further by making the strategic abilities an essential part of deceiving your enemy, as opposed to making them ways to improve your methods of slaughter. Still, it's a relatively well-known and loved system at this point. It's nice that RUSE is building upon its predecessors instead of trying (and possibly failing) to radically innovate, although it's to see whether or not they should've taken the risk of failure.

RUSE is not Eugen's first real-time strategy game. Before RUSE, they worked on the lesser-known RTS Act of War: Direct Action. While it sported a generic name and an even more generic modern warfare storyline, it had a few major things going for it. It had a very good sense of balance, which led to an incredibly fun multiplayer between three factions. It introduced a few elements that haven't really been seen in RTS games before or since, such as prisoners of war or incapacitated soldiers that either had to be rescued or killed. There was an interesting cover and building destruction system that would later show up in Company of Heroes. In other words, it was decent, but nothing too spectacular.