The game play is pretty straightforward. Combat is simple, but serviceable and fun. The ship building is a major draw, but sometimes is constrained too much by the resource acquisition game. The exploration is a MAJOR part of the game, and is simple and fun.

But all that really gets overshadowed by how clever this game is. There's a lot of subtle humor, and you quickly become invested in reading the descriptions of silly mundane things like your crew as digging up lumps of minerals. The Alien races are very distinctive, both in ship design and interaction. Wiskamug is the best lil' guy, and it's whole fun seeing him ventilate the hulls of evildoers into the void.

besides that it's well designed in many ways. The ship construction strikes a great balance between complexity and simplicity while offering an interesting challenge. There's different ways of traversing the universe that you can keep your eye out for that make things fun.

It's very easy to recommend this, even if you'll only spend 20 hours on this game. But I'll be playing it for a long time.

This game has always been fun and silly. I picked it up at release and kept up with it, and I was excited when the devs said they were coming back to it, despite it originally being an april fools joke.

But the most recent update really changed the game in fundamental awesome ways. It's a pretty legit shooter now! I really recommend it, and for 5 dollars it's a steal!

So here's the thing. Paid mods, basically microtransactions for small cosmetic items or actual functional items. It's dumb, no one really wants it, there's much better mods of Nexus and elsewhere. They bill it as getting these things from the community and in house, but who is actually doing this work is utterly opaque. It's about as "community driven" as the rest of the game is.

The kicker: You have to PAY for the priviledge to buy these mods. That's right. They've got the gall to make you pay an extra 8 dollars for the ability to pay for these things. Want that single pipboy skin? 8 dollars off the bat.

What's worse: They're damn expensive. Upwards of four dollars for a backpack. Five for a power armor set. And considering they've got options for 5500 credit ($40) packs, they're expecting you to be able to spend *a lot* of money on here.

And for this they're sacrificing users getting the Steam workshop. This is just a repackaging of microtransactions under a diferent name to make it seem "nice" and part of the "community"

RUSE sits atop my list of most interesting and original RTS games ever. It focuses on an oft forgotten element of strategy games that is none the less very important, information and in doing so, creates a very unique experience. Many other RTS games play off of the critical element of information being an important gameplay element, but many times these are more emergent gameplay constructs, rather than contrived purposeful systems put into place by the designers.

The most obvious system the works off of information as a system is the Ruse cards themselves. A player is given ruses to use regularly throughout a given match which they can use in a variety of ways. Some very typical and expected ruse cards are available, like given your units a speed boost or forcing your units to continue fighting when heavily damaged instead of retreating. But you can also use Ruse cards to stealth your units in a given area unless your enemy has line of sight on them. Additionally, you can create fake attacks of tanks of aircraft in order to trick your opponent into diverting their units from other critical areas or making them produce units to counter your nonexistant attacking force.

Beyond Ruse cards, there also exist numerous terrain features that one can hide your units in, such as forests and cities. By doing so, you give your units an attack advantage, and make it impossible for your enemy to fight back directly. By utilizing both elements of deception and information correctly, you can be an increcibly tricky opponent to play against.

Unit type are varied and intersting as well. There exists 6 broad catagories of units one can build and utilize, in addition to immobile defense structures. These catagories are the typical expected for the 1940s era combat: Infantry, Armor, Artillary, Anti-tank, Aircraft and Experimental units. With the units available to each faction it serves to create a very unique play experience for each side, and typically each faction has some number of units that function in some unique way or have a particular advantage that no other faction has. Example include Italy having a very cheap but effective heavy tank, or France having immediate access to Advanced Anti-Tanks guns, or Japanese infantry having unique and powerful variations on the normal infantry types. Each faction also has some clear weaknesses that opponents can exploit and players have to mitigate against, like how Germany requires a lot of research in order to access their basic tanks, or America's lack of cheap artillary units.

Map design is generally varied and good, with some clear thought having gone into creating choke points and areas of critical interest to both sides. Some maps however clearly favor some factions over other due to base placement and defensability however, which can be annoying.

The AI is fairly robust for a newer players and can give a decent amount of playability to someone that doesn't feel like playing other humans. Be aware though, that the AI does cheat on hard mode, and clearly gets free money. The interface is also really novel and well designed. It takes elements of clearly having been designed for play on a console, and insitutes them in such a way that a PC player can exploit the control elements to good effect with very little frustration.

RUSE is a rather slow paced game to be sure though. Players coming from Starcraft 2 or the Dawn of War seires might get bored of how mellow the moment to moment game play can be. Even in the midst of combat there can be very little need for micromanagement which may come as a shock to some. I like RUSE for this though, because it's a good break from other faster paced games, but I know that a lot of people wouldn't be into how mellow it is.

Overall I'll give ruse a top reccomendation to anyone I know that likes RTS games. It's an unfortunately missed gem of a game from several years ago that still deserves a thorough playing.