Gaming Review

Red Orchestra returns with a tortuously accurate recreation of the Battle of Stalingrad

Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad

No more heroes any more

RELEASE OUT NOW

y kit is perfect. My boots polished, my Heer helmet a shiny green. I poke my head around a corner and get it shot off. The next man in my squad is a sniper, but hes hopelessly out of position, out of cover and is sniped down quickly. Another man is suppressed into terror. Another is blown apart by artillery. And so on, until my squad is down to the last man. We never see the enemy In that sense, Red Orchestra 2 is a tremendous success. It replicates the feeling of World War II, the terror and random death of its key setting, the Battle of Stalingrad. It does this as well as anyone has done so far, and it does it with a tremendous desire for accuracy. The game is, of course, much larger than its predecessor. Its got both two single-player campaigns and the huge multiplayer, which is the core of the game. Its got a range of vehicles, a December 2011

VITAL STATISTICS
Price 25 Developer Tripwire Publisher Tripwire Multiplayer 64 player DRM Steam Web www. heroesof stalingrad.com Community steamcommunity. com/games/RO2 Discuss forum. pcformat.co.uk

nice selection of maps, and a range of classes for each side. Everything is meticulously researched to behave exactly like the technology of the day. There are some aws though. The control system isnt exactly intuitive, though the FPS elements of it are so familiar. For example, youre holding a heavy machine gun and you want to shoot it. You crouch behind cover using [L-Ctrl], then mount the bipod using the right mouse button. Aim down the barrel and adjust for distance using the mouse wheel. Press [6] and youll change the guns barrel. While youre getting confused by that, someone attacks you in melee; to ght back, you try to tap the middle mouse button, but that doesnt work for the HMG, instead ring a single shot, so unless youre a crack shot, youre dead. (pressing [6] on a sniper rie, by contrast, allows you to look through the iron sights instead of the scope essential if you nd yourself in a short-

range reght.) Each weapon type has its own quirks that you need to learn and until youve played a lot (or played through the singleplayer, which is hard to recommend) you simply arent going to remember them all.

Plays well with others

Talking about the single player, its obviously not the developers forte. The two campaigns are frankly terrible and repetitive, with dreadful AI and a real feeling of pointlessness and lets not even talk about the poor voiceacting. You can take part in the various missions, all a variety of capture this point and kill the enemies, but its easier to just sprint around, hide for a bit and let the AI teams wipe each other out, slowly. These are meant to be the tutorial and you will learn to play the game from these, but theyre simply not fun to play through. Moving to the core multiplayer game, everything suddenly comes alive. A total

100

Each weapon is meticulously researched

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10/4/11 9:59:50 AM

Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad

War is brutal, grenades do more than just slow you down

Something Unreal
The Red Orchestra team originally got into development by winning the Make Something Unreal competition, with its mooted million-dollar prize pot. However, after expenses and smaller prizes were taken out, it actually ended up around $30,000, so the Tripwire team were on the knife edge of bankruptcy; until, that is, Valve agreed to sell its mod if it was polished up to a full game. Hence Red Orchestra was the rst non-Valve shooter on Steam, and hence the team got its chance to work on the real dream game this!

Driving a tank gives you a somewhat restricted view

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Veterans get a suitably mussed up uniform to reect their lack of hygiene

A very solid multiplayer FPS set in World War II thats going to get better with time

RO2s control system isnt that intuitive, especially in close quarters

The range of classes and the chaos of 64 player matches

brings Red Orchestra 2s brutal and tense multiplayer alive

of 64 players with a range of classes, pummelling each other with guns, tanks and rie butts is just plain exciting. Its still not particularly original, but realism isnt. For example, tanks are hugely entertaining death traps, with four positions able to be taken by driver, commander, main gunner and secondary gunner; theyre also hugely realistic, meaning they break in all sorts of interesting ways. Combat is fast and players are believably fragile; if you dont die, you often bleed out before you can bandage yourself up. The soundscape is also believable, without the saturation of Modern Warfare; you can hear where gun battles are happening from all across the map. Player outts change as the game goes on; veteran players are differentiated by looking more ragged than new recruits, even when changing into the all-white snow gear. The classes are also more varied

and non-combatant than expected; for example, the Squad-leader and Commander classes are designed to keep other team members alive, order other players around, or call in tactical assistance, in the form of artillery strikes. It does have its problems; for example, at the time of writing, its still very buggy, so that the server browser doesnt always work and players can get stuck moving around on cover. Given Tripwires expertise with managing its community, we expect some of these to be xed soon but check before you buy. Whats most refreshing is that the game feels like the mods of the late 1990s; enthusiastic, determined to justify its existence and keen to stay fun. Except that this time its been polished up to modern standards.

War weary

Whats depressing is that theres a real lack of imagination; its not sufcient to take a solid engine, make it beautiful, and replicate World War II. That battle has been fought over and over, and were bored of it now. What we have is a very solid multiplayer rst person shooter set in World War II thats going to get better with time; buy it for that, but nothing else. Dan Griliopoulos

Needs 2.3GHz dual core, 2GB RAM, 256MB 3D card Wants 2.6GHz quad core, 3GB RAM, 512MB 3D card Superb multiplayer Meticulous recreation Buggy at launch Dreadful single player An awful single player and bugs ruin the best WW II multiplayer game out there, unforgiving and primitive, like the war.

Das ist mein Gewehr. Es gibt viele es nicht mgen, aber das hier ist mein

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