In RO2, I get the sense that slower-paced, tactical gameplay is truly rewarded. To be frank, when I play FPSes online, I usually get the sense of ten or twenty people randomly milling about, killing each other when they get the chance. This is one of the few FPSes on the market that truly requires focus and teamwork. In the game's best multiplayer moments, all of this works. With no HUD, you have to check your gun to see how much ammo you have. Your hands wobble realistically, adding another layer of difficulty to hitting what you're aiming at. With many weapons, you'll need to adjust the sights to hit targets at different distances.

The guns are carefully designed to mimic their real-life counterparts too, right down to their range, bullet drop, and iron sights. Even the tanks are realistic, painstakingly designed to resemble real tanks. You have to bandage yourself quickly if you're shot non-fatally, and close encounters with enemies are over quickly. There are no crosshairs on the screen to guide your attempts to run-and-gun. There's no real HUD (though you'll see bars that represent your energy when you run and your health when you get hit). RO2 also offers unparalleled realism in a variety of other ways. But this is, by far, the most realistic representation of cover ever in a video game. There are problems with execution here-sometimes going in or out of cover can be glitchy, and sometimes you can't take cover where you clearly should be able to. You can shoot blindly if you're just laying covering fire, but otherwise you have to lean out and aim. You push an action button to get into cover, and unlike in a third-person game, you can't see what's going on unless you stick your head out and risk getting shot. RO2's cover system is so simple and effective that it's amazing no other developer came up with it first.

As shooter fans know, most cover-based games have been set in the third person-and even Rainbow Six Vegas, a rare first-person game with a cover system, pulls out to a third-person view whenever you hide behind a protective barrier. To me, the most important development is a first-person cover system.

I have a great deal of respect for all of the things Red Orchestra 2 does for the first-person shooter genre, so I'd like to start there. It's a few major patches away from being a great multiplayer experience, and I couldn't get much enjoyment out of the single-player mode at all. Both of these attributes are rare in modern first-person shooters, especially shooters set in World War II.īut thanks to a small budget, Red Orchestra 2 feels incomplete, despite the many years it spent in development. It is obviously a labor of love for developer Tripwire, and it contains plenty of great ideas that few other games have tried. It's hard not to feel conflicted about Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad.

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