The Good War That Never Ends

The World War II real-time strategy game is almost a genre unto itself. It does away with base building, for the most part, and is organized in scenarios designed to test your tactical abilities. You can’t count on more tanks arriving to push through that strong point, because there may be no more tanks to be had. The scenarios invariably give you a goal or series of goals to meet in order to win the right to progress to the next scenario in a very loosely designed historical campaign.
The trick is separating the good games from the merely derivative ones. If all these real-time tactical games are fundamentally the same, how can you distinguish between quality and copycat versions? Even the titles are unoriginal. Neither Rush for Berlin (Paradox/Teen/3.5 stars) nor Moscow to Berlin: Red Siege (Cinemaware Marquee/Teen/2.5 stars) does enough to qualify itself as truly different, but there is a distinction to be made between “same but good” and “same.”
Rush for Berlin takes the formula and tweaks it only a little. There are four campaigns, including two wildly original ones. Once you’ve completed the basic Western Front/Eastern Front campaigns, you are allowed to try one based on the French Resistance to Nazi occupation and one based on an alternative history where a non-Nazi Germany tries to force a negotiated peace.
Rush for Berlin also puts a time limit on your missions, so you can’t just wait around while your soldiers heal or your tanks are repaired. Meeting optional goals means more time on the clock to put toward your main objectives, and extra time can come in handy. When you start a mission, you can take along extra troops if you like, but you pay a time penalty for this. Rush for Berlin still has a fail, fail again feel, as you stumble into disaster a half-dozen times, carefully taking note of what is around every corner. This enables your psychic soldiers to complete the mission eventually, but it does detract from the spontaneity of the enterprise. The unit count in most scenarios is fairly small, so it avoids a lot of the technical issues that plague lesser titles.
Lesser titles like Moscow to Berlin: Red Siege, for example. Developer Monte Cristo has made World War II games before, and they have all fit the template to some extent. Moscow to Berlin is almost slavish in the way it sticks to the formula and gives no sign of wanting to be anything more.
Typically, your foot soldiers are useless. Aside from their ability to avoid setting off the mines littering the battlefield, most infantry are cannon fodder. They are best used to take control of enemy vehicles, unless they happen to be specialists like sappers or scouts. Even in an urban setting like Sevastopol or Berlin, the tank is king instead of a flaming box of steel.
You command a lot of troops in your standard scenario, so pathfinding is much worse than it should be. Instead of moving through groups of infantry, something that many recent RTS games allow, your vehicles insist on taking the long way around. If there is no obvious path to the destination, they will plow down trees, run through minefields, get stuck on building corners—anything but move toward the goal in a sensible manner. It’s almost funny to watch your clueless troops jostle for position while artillery drops on their heads. True, this isn’t a “lasso guys and go” type of game, but it requires much more babysitting than any game of this sort should.
Neither game is especially attractive, and both have interface quirks that can make it difficult to know whether you have, in fact, activated that special power you need. Rush for Berlin is less interested in drawing out tiny differences between types of Panzers than Moscow to Berlin is; instead, it focuses on small missions that still give you a sense of progress through a larger conflict. Moscow to Berlin envisions you as the traffic cop of the Eastern Front, shepherding your flock of armor and infantry through narrow streets in the correct order to minimize casualties. Both cover ground we’ve seen too often lately, but at least Rush for Berlin tries something slightly new.

This article originally appeared in Computer Games Magazine #190