Reviewed: July 2, 2006
Reviewed by: Jeff Gedgaud

Publisher
Cinemaware

Developer
Monte Cristo

Released: June 28, 2006
Genre: RTS
Players: 1-2
ESRB: Teen

7
9
9
7
8.3

System Requirements

Monte Cristo puts all the focus on the battles with only a few problems in gameplay to mar an otherwise great game. The graphics are really awesome with your views being able to get so close up you can tell the soldiers do need a shave as well as a shower. Okay maybe not that detailed but you’ll get the idea when you check out the great screen shots I was able to take of the action.

Moscow to Berlin: Red Siege offers players an epic look into the strategies of real time WWII warfare on the Eastern Front. Follow the action through history from the German offensive at Barbarossa all the way to the Red Army's siege of Berlin. 20 action-packed missions put players in command of both the German and Red Armies. Historically accurate battles, equipment, and cut scenes provide a fascinating look into key WWII conflicts.

Red Siege features:

• Three fascinating solo campaigns featuring battles from the Axis and Russian sides with a total of 20 replayable missions.
• Over 100 authentic weapons, vehicles, and units to unleash against the enemy.
• Encyclopedia mode provides historic background and strategic tips.
• Over 100 authentic weapons, vehicles, and units to unleash against the enemy.
• Three multiplayer modes including Conquer, Capture the Flag, and Deathmatch.
• Artillery support, air strikes, and aerial recon give armies long range support before rolling in tanks!
• Stunning graphics show the intense detail of the Russian and German battlegrounds as weather seasons change.
• Narrated in-game cut scenes explain objectives and historical significance of each mission.
• Boxed version includes exclusive Red Siege dog tag and poster!

You have the usual controls of units using your mouse and some quick commands on the keyboard. The units you have at your command are realistic with a wide variety of troops, vehicles and even airplanes. The troops break down into very useful ones but many times you will have a very limited amount of time to use them. The most useful ones I found were the sappers for disarming mines before you sent in your tanks and laying mines in certain circumstances.

The main focus of Red Siege is battle and this is best accomplished with your tanks and other armored vehicles with support from your artillery or aircraft as well as the troops. The best use for most of the troops is standing by waiting for enemy vehicles to become available and taken over for your own use.

During gameplay at crucial points of some levels a cut scene will cut in with important information about the rest of the mission and your objectives which they do in a unique way. The screen will fade and then cut back to your own fighting and moving your units around that you had just done but in a black and white movie type scene having just been recorded by the game. Then it will show you what your next objective is while moving the camera around while still in a movie type scene. Then it moves back to your previous position and cuts back to the normal color view and you get to move on with the level.

This recording and use of the action at a pause point with the cut scene is really cool and a neat addition that I can see being an up and coming thing in future games. This is not a great thing or even a big help while playing Red Siege but it certainly is cool.

Red Siege makes use of realistic armored vehicles and you get plenty of them during missions. Not only useful tanks, artillery and howitzers but armored personnel carriers and repair vehicles are at your disposal to help you in each mission. There are so many vehicles and tanks that it takes a few missions to find out the best use of some of them. I did find the encyclopedia very useful not only to admire the wide variety of vehicles but to try and figure out what each one is best at.

The camera covers such a small area that you can be rushed to do things on different parts of the same battle and have enough time to get all that you want accomplished. You can always use the time compression buttons in the setup to slow things down which I found handy. It would have been better if the camera could pull further back but they might have done this to make it harder on you.

Another thing you really have to pay attention to is the cut scene describing your objectives. Some missions are not as simple as taking over a position or maintaining a defense at one spot. Some can be difficult and this makes the game that much better and harder.

Some of the missions are very challenging as well as fun. They use a term called pocket and you can find your mission to be getting out of the pocket and then back to your defense line or some such. It could be confusing but it is also fun as well as a challenge to accomplish all the movements of the troops and vehicles when you don’t really want to leave anything behind for the enemy to use against you further along in the same mission.

The tutorials are not exactly necessary but it will help get used to the controls and how the game operates in general. The game comes with a very easy menu type key command changer on the start menu of Windows to change the key assignments for Red Siege.

There are also a few multiplayer games you can try your luck at but getting someone else to play along with might be tough. I could not find anyone else to play with at Gamespy and you would have to know someone else who has Red Siege to play over the Internet with. There are three game types to play over the internet; conquer, capture the flag and deathmatch.

I have a new video card, Nvidia 6600 with 256 MB RAM and had very little frame rate drop while playing on the highest detail settings of all the things like shadow, particle and texturing details. The game plays very well on these high settings and only at the very peek of action did I see any problems.

Red Siege has some great graphics in all the wide variety of details that are in any one scene. When you are fighting the explosions and all the action looks great, even the things you don’t quite see well are detailed.

When you have a bombing run from an aircraft the bombs are great just as they are falling and you can clearly see the planes shadow on the ground even if you don’t catch a glimpse of it. The planes are well detailed when you do see them but many times I could not catch a good snap shot of one as I would be concentrating on the action and not worrying about my strikes I called in a little while ago.

The debris of the scenes is also highly detailed so you can make out parts of tanks like treads among the bodies and parts of buildings. Some of the debris stays the entire mission but others disappear after awhile. One neat part of the game is when you hit a tank or other vehicle and it is not damaged beyond use you have to hurry up to get your men into it. Or it will blow up and be unusable by everyone.

You have to get used to one thing in this area of the game, orders do not make much sense when their being given in Russian or German. You get the gist of what is going on when things heat up and you understand what you need to do to accomplish your missions without knowing what your guys are saying.

The missions will take more than twenty hours to play even on easy difficulty setting and the harder settings make for even more difficulty in the missions. They have some really good AI for the game and it takes into account things like terrain and unit types when attacking. The games campaigns can be played in one of four difficulty settings but you can also play some of the best individual missions on their own in single player mode. You also get the different difficulty settings to play these 13 missions on when you jump into them.

The missions are all well made and have really good objectives with a truly unique cut scene system. I really enjoyed how the cut scenes play from the movies to the game and back while you’re playing. The movie is very realistic of the movies seen back then and to have them go from the movie to your units at the start of the next part of the game is extremely well done.

Cinemaware Marquee and Monte Cristo can really take pride in a well-made game with many of the parts combining for a great game. Moscow to Berlin: Red Siege has some unique elements that make it original enough to be different than all the other World War II real time simulation games that have been hitting the PC scene lately.