E3 06: Moscow to Berlin: Red Siege Preshow Hands-On

The Russian Front of World War II gets little attention in World War II real-time strategy games, even though it featured the largest armies, as well as the largest battles. That's slowly changing, as developers continue to mine World War II for games and realize that there are only so many times that you can re-create D-Day. Moscow to Berlin: Red Siege is the latest World War II strategy game from Monte Cristo Games, following Desert Rats vs. Afrika Korps and (of course) D-Day, and as its name suggests, this is a real-time strategy game that's all about the Russian Front.

Moscow to Berlin covers the scope of the Russian Front, from the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 (Operation Barbarossa), to the titanic land battles in the heart of Russia in 1942 and 1943, to the Red Army's triumphant march on Berlin in 1945. Like its predecessors, Moscow to Berlin isn't a traditional real-time strategy game, because you do not gather resources, build an economy, and construct units on the battlefield. Instead, it's more of a real-time tactical game, where you're given a set of units ranging from infantry squads to tanks, and you have to command them to victory, mainly by seizing objectives and eliminating the enemy.

The gameplay in Moscow to Berlin adheres to its predecessors pretty closely in that this isn't an ultra-realistic wargame where one shot can kill a tank; units do have health bars that slowly whittle down as they take damage. Pull a badly damaged unit back and you can repair it, so long as you have the appropriate vehicle or unit. Like the earlier Monte Cristo World War II games, armor plays a very big role in Moscow to Berlin, and there's nothing quite like rolling up with a half-dozen tanks and blasting everything away. With that said, it's up to you to use your units wisely, particularly at harder difficulty levels where you can die a lot more easily.

To capture the huge variety of equipment that was employed on the Eastern Front during four years of warfare, the game introduces a slew of new vehicles, such as the German Jagdpanther assault gun/tank destroyer and the famed Soviet T-34 tank. You also have "off-board" elements at your disposal, in the form of artillery and air strikes that you can call in. Infantry come in different varieties, from sappers to regular infantry, and you can load them onto transports or barricade them into buildings and bunkers. It's all pretty standard for the series and for World War II real-time strategy game in general.

Moscow to Berlin will ship with three multiplayer modes, including the traditional deathmatch and capture the flag modes, along with a new mode called conquest. The graphics engine seems relatively unchanged since 2004's Desert Rats, though the flip side of this means that the game shouldn't have any issues running on older systems. With that said, it may look a bit dated compared to other World War II real-time strategy games. This is a crowded genre, after all, so we'll see how Moscow to Berlin does when it ships this summer.