Then I put it in and started playing it, and I changed my mind quickly. Why? Because this is a good World War II RTS, and it comes up with a couple of cool things I hadn't seen before that make it unique.

The basics are fairly straight forward. You have various types of units - infantry, various types of tanks, various special units and officers. The units gain experience points over the course of the campaign, so keeping them alive is even more important - they'll gain extra abilities. They start off with special abilities, too. Some officers can call in paratroopers. Recon vehicles can call in airstrikes. Partisans can place explosives, and my favorite: Soviet political officers can give their men double shots of vodka, improving their morale. (There was a reason, I believe, that one of the first verbs we learned in Russian 101 in college was "to drink shots".)

The units are accurate to history. A lot of times you won't be creating them on the spot except in certain missions or deathmatches but rather have an allotment (your core army) that you select units from to start with. You may have allies you meet up that you can control, other times you'll have allies that help you, but you cannot control.

The campaigns are the big hook. You see, it is called RUSH for Berlin for a reason. You're in a race against time. With each mission you need to weigh the benefits of speed versus fulfilling optional objectives versus the lives of your men. You see, it's not a question of whether or not Berlin is going to fall (at least, not yet), but rather, it's a question of who gets to it first, the Allies or the Soviets.

There are two campaigns available at the beginning: the Russians and the Western Allies. The Russians are the "easier" campaign, thanks to the advantages they have. First off, they tend to have a lot more men at their disposal. The Soviets had not only the immense manpower (and by this stage of the game) the industrial capacity to fill in enormous human wave attacks, but the morale derived from their patriotism, their hatred of the Germans, and the political willpower (in the form of political officers) to make up for any breaks in the morale. They also started closer.

The Allies are the harder campaign. They don't have the manpower for the war of attrition that the Soviets can muster, but must instead factor in their technological power while keeping their side together. The manual even tells you that "mediocre" play as the Allies will let you reach the Elbe River, but it is the "privilege of the best" to beat the Soviets to Berlin.

If you beat both of these campaigns (there are only seven missions in each), a third campaign opens up - the Germans.

There are limits, though, to what any game company would put into a game like this, and you're not taking the role of a virtual Hitler. Instead, he's removed in the "equivalent" of the July 1944 coup, and the Nazis are downplayed in it. (Remember that in the real world, the National Socialist Party was not the whole of Germany, though they ran it; the Wehrmacht, or German army, had its own traditions and history, and often times its officers were opposed to Nazi goals and ideologies. It was Wehrmacht officers who attempted to kill Hitler with a bomb.) The Germans only real advantage is a supply of Me-262 jet fighters, which can help fight off Allied air superiority.

There's one additional campaign, too - the French campaign. Unlike the other three, it's not a race against time. Each mission is opened up by successfully completing missions in the other three campaigns, and the final mission is opened up by beating the German campaign.

The time element of the campaigns forces you to make decisions, and it was a nice change of pace for me. Typically, when I play an RTS, I'm a very slow player, moving slowly, constantly creating new units, not moving on until I'm certain I have control. Rush for Berlin prevented me from doing that due to the lack of reinforcements in many battles and the nature of the time being a big part of the game. At first, I wasn't certain about that, but I found I liked it for the edge it forced into my decisions.

The game typically runs smoothly. The hardest part about game play for me was remembering when to left click and when to right click - the controls interchange quite a bit when you're learning them, so it takes a while. For example, it's right click to move or attack a specific target - but if you want to do an attacking move, you hold down A and left click. It's non-intuitive. Maneuvering the camera around the three dimensional map is a bit slow, but works well for getting in and out of tight situations. I had a bit of difficulty at first getting my troops out of buildings (you can take cover in them, but only with one squad at a time) at first, but got the hang of it.

The AI isn't that bad for the most part. Units do a good job of attacking enemies they see and defending themselves against attacks. They occasionally will take different routes to the same place - if you have, say, three squads of infantry and three medics all selected, and tell them to attack the same place, two squads and two medics will run around one direction, and the other group will flank the enemy. At times, that's good - you get a free flanking maneuver - but at other times you'll find yourself getting ripped to pieces and needing to load a saved game (don't worry, you can save anywhere).

I was also especially happy to see how well the medics keep your troops healed even without using their special abilities. I hate micromanagement.

There are several multiplayer modes, using names like RUSH (Relentlessly Utilized Score Hunt), where you race for various points and objects on the map, and RISK (Race Intensive Strategic Kombat) where you get one to three random tasks to do.

The graphics are great in the game. It's got a kind of retro, almost art deco look to the menus, and the actual game play graphics are very good looking. The full motion videos before and after missions are also quite good, the only nit I could find to pick with them was the translated text at the bottom of the screen was often covered up for some reason by the movie itself.

Where the graphics are great, the audio is even better. Your soldiers yell in battle. The weapons sound good and you can even hear trees crash to the ground. Better yet, the music is very well done, and just feels perfect for the game. It's really one of the first times I've flat out stopped and said "hey - that's some good tunes for this game."

The game isn't perfect. As I said, there were some issues with subtitles in the full motion videos, and the tutorial is good but could be better. It leaves some things out, and worst off, changes what you're doing occasionally. My biggest frustration was that I was trying to learn how to give hot key numbers to various groups, and the tutorial kept resetting them. There's also the game controls that I mentioned earlier, which really feel like they should've been a bit more standardized. I had a couple of problems with the game locking up (often predicted by stuttering in the audio) and needing to be killed from the task manager, or just flat out crashing to desktop, but I couldn't say now if that's due to something on my end or the game. (I hesitatingly have to point the finger at the game, though, as I don't have those issues with the other games I've been playing recently.) They've already patched once, though, and it would be expected if there are more issues coming up that they'll fix them, too.

In conclusion, if you're a fan of real time strategy games, and/or a fan of World War 2 games, do yourself a favor and pick this one up. It's a good change of pace to both of those, and even people who don't always like RTS type games may find this one quite enjoyable.