Given that a lot of early reviews for Red Orchestra were lauding its impressive showing, imagine my disappointment when, after loading up the game for the second time following an initial crash to desktop, I fired up the newly touted single player campaign only to be met by a badly thrown together AI rendition of a multiplayer game ,in which my impressive D/K (Death to Kills) ratio was proving to be incredibly indicative of the very minimal impact I was actually having on the whole experience (which, by sheer fortune and mass confusion, we somehow won). Well, maybe they did have big plans but none of them have really translated well at all. With the rise of Call of Duty making the genre a global phenomenon, and physics and visuals far surpassing everything the original Unreal 2 engine was ever capable of, surely one of the most innovative teams in the field had bigger plans than my own expectations for Heroes of Stalingrad?
Having known that the team had long been at work on this, I was notably keen to get back in the trenches with this one and to see how the six year gap between the projects had impacted upon that. Six years on from that initial retail release and the team are back with a fully realised sequel, complete with a single player campaign for the very first time, and all released on the eve of the biggest FPS war in gaming history. It was the most refreshing game I’d played in a long time, with 32 man multiplayer battles being more tactical and patient affairs with plenty of teamwork required in order to edge out the win.
The game was a major innovation in the FPS genre, heavily praised for its no-nonsense approach to shooter mechanics by boldly electing to remove the crosshair from the HUD, forcing players to make use of a weapon’s iron sights should they actually want to hit anything.
#RED ORCHESTRA 2 HEROES OF STALINGRAD SINGLE PLAYER CAMPAIGN MOD#
Given that we were also at that stage in 2004 when we’d first completed the cycle, Tripwire Interactive proved that there was still plenty of work to be done on the subject yet – creating, releasing and winning the ‘Make Something Unreal’ mod competition with their entry, Red Orchestra: Combat Arms (later released as RO: Ostfront 41-45 at retail).
Given that the original multiplayer FPS was centred around killing Nazis (or mutated/undead/robotic versions of them, at least) back in 1992, you’d think that we’d have seen all there is to see by now, especially from the first person shooter perspective. It’s said that the game industry’s fascination with the Second World War has now run twice as long than the war actually did.
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