RUSE is an military RTS with a twist: temporary buffs and cool abilities that you can use whenever you want. These affects are limited by a zone system, where the ruse is only valid inside a certain place on the map that you can pick from. The bonuses themselves have quite a few different faces, and can be reused over time. The most profound are speed bonuses, decoy units and buildings, and an ability to make your units fight to the death instead of retreating.
The only other thing that separates this game is the ability to zoom in so close that you can watch every bullet, then zoom so far back that the looks like, or rather, is a tabletop game. This allows for almost perfect control over each individual troop, as well as platoons of them. This also makes the system requirements high, and extremely high if you want to run it on the highest settings.
There is not much else to say about this seemingly standard game of war. It is available to play, for free, for the next week or so via Steam. Check it out if you have the chance. Like I say with all the other free things I review, what do you have to lose?
