Upon completing yet another level in Rush for Berlin's arduous campaign to rid the world of the fascist hordes, I'm struck with a sudden urgency to see how fast I can complete everyday menial tasks in the hope of some gainly rewards. Getting up in the morning has become a full blown race to see how fast I can shake my body from its semi-conscious state, get to the bathroom and be ready in time for breakfast, then rushing to the shops to buy essential supplies before the trip to work, which has now become a full blown search for hidden shortcuts.

Rush for Berlin doesn't care how good you are at strategy games, and shrugs with general disdain at how well you can build armies and launch mass assault; it just wants to know if you are any good at using these skills within a strict time limit. You are in a race, you see; at the tail end of the Second World War it's your job to race the other allied nations to the German capital and force surrender, lest you suffer the embarrassing indignity of second place.

Success and failure are measured by how fast or slow you are at overcoming the enemy forces that block your entrance to Hitler's homeland; be too meandering and don't expect an invite to Churchill's next birthday party; be fast and decisive however, and expect your shoulder to become numb from all the patting it'll receive! It's worth pointing out that there is no time limit with which to work against; you can take as long as you want in each level without the threat of losing simply because you were too slow moving those tanks up or took too long manoeuvring that group of sappers around the enemy, but doing so incurs penalties, central to which is the score system.

Each level begins with a score bar, one that continues to count down as the level progresses. Take too long and it counts down to nothing, likewise actually getting into the swing of battle, completing one of a variety of primary, secondary or secret objectives, and you're awarded huge boosts to the score, subsequently affecting your overall performance rating at the end. Occasionally you're thrust into situations that require you to work fast and under pressure; the rush to silence enemy demolitionists before they level an entire factory or the race to stop a train leaving its platform and rejoining its own forces being just two. There's a real sense of urgency in every level, heightened by the fact that the units under your command gain experience and become better fighters as they do so, making mass cluttered assaults of units a rather fruitless and unrewarding experience.

Rush for Berlin's fast pace means it hasn't the time to bother itself with military or historical realism, opting instead for fast, quick, poptastic strategy. Not that there's anything here that won't please hardened desktop commanders looking for some meat to gnaw on; RfB's levels are large in size and often filled with numerous objectives, some of which are entirely up to you whether you compelete them or not, but they do add some variety in a game largely obsessed with blowing things up.

Completion of these nets you some lovely looking medels, but more often they can add a great deal to your score and aid you in the later sections of the level, where the increasingly entrenched enemy forces can cause heaps of trouble. Developers Stormregion, those who provided us with the lovingly detailed and pleasingly enjoyable Codename Panzers games, have taken what's good from their previous efforts and condensed it into an immensely more playable, albeit far too familiar experience.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the graphics, an area Stromregion always seem to excel at; the visuals far surpass their previous work, with an incredible level of detail that shows every oil stain and every scratch on each tank and jeep. I could go on about how luscious the foliage looks and how picturesque the landscapes are, but you'll only really come to appreciate the game's looks when you're blowing seven shades of Nazi-decorated-astroturf out of it. The sight of a line of Katyusha's letting their payload of rockets billow out into a poorly defended, unprepared defence of German tanks and mortars is always a breathtakingly destructive one. Seeing cities levelled to their foundations and tanks exploding never gets old, while clicking the air strike button always manages to raise a slightly maniacal smile as you prepare for the destruction it's about to unleash. Such a shame then that occasionally its looks can get the better of it, with some slight performance hits in areas of mass carnage.

Other problems arise with the gameplay, and for a game that forces you to enact serious decisions on a whim, it's a shame that Stormregion failed to put the same effort into the AI as they did with the graphics. While I could almost live with the unresponsiveness of units that sit there and take a beating while out of range of the enemy vehicles pummelling them, pathfinding becomes so problematic that a reliance on autosaving soon destroys whatever atmosphere the 'Rush' originally gave.

It's almost bearable in open levels, despite occasions where tanks ignore the safer route to where you ordered them and plough straight into a frozen lake (a moment in which I had to hold my head in my hand at the sheer stupidity I had just witnessed) but in built up areas it becomes far too troublesome. Tanks and vehicles get stuck in the scenery, in each other, in everything, while moving large groups is near suicidal, as it always results in you losing a few tanks because the others failed to move around a lamppost and got stuck. Moments like these spoil what is largely a fun if never quite remarkable game. There's plenty to do with, four campaigns charting the downfall of Hitler's would-be empire, or fuelling its emergence in new re-imagined form, while the unit list, though never quite as impressive or as vast as Codename: Panzers, does keep the action interesting.

Numerous multiplayer options round things off, and on top of the usual Deathmatch, Co-op and Domination modes come two new types of implausibly named multiplayer games, R.U.S.H. (that's Relentlessly Utilized Score Hunt) a mode where players race each other to be the highest scoring commander of the game and R.I.S.K. (Race-Intensive Strategic Kombat), an objective-based game where players seek to complete certain tasks to win, all the while seeking to sabotage other players' efforts to do the same.

Rush for Berlin isn't the type of game to be completed over one weekend, and while we could sit here and bemoan the fact that yes, it's another World War II game, and yes, you've played this kind of thing before with more intuitive AI, the new time element adds a nice twist to the familiar theme of tanks and Nazis. It's nothing new, it's nothing that's going to set the world of RTS gaming alight, but for a time it's as pleasingly enjoyable as Stormregion's other past offerings. Now if only they could shake their obsession with WWII…

Reviewed by Kieron Giacopazzi for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).