You can fire in the blind, of course, but that isn’t much of a strategy for survival. If the cover is too tall, you won’t be able to see over it to fire. It is here that you will discover that taking cover behind the nearest vertical surface is not enough you have to make sure that you are a little more selective when it comes to selecting cover to make sure that the cover isn’t too tall or too short. It is in multi-player, when you are fighting with and against intelligent opponents, that the wonderful attention to realism and detail starts to pay off. It should have come as no surprise that putting a functionally illiterate troop in a tank results only in a functionally illiterate tank commander.Īs unsatisfying as the single-player is, the multi-player truly delivers. Unfortunately, the same challenges with the AI on both sides of the conflict crushed any hope that there would be some challenging fun to be had. Certainly the tanks themselves were very nicely modeled, and the ability to transfer stations within the tank to take the place of injured or dead crew members was a nice innovation. I had high hopes that the tank fighting would be better. Life is pretty cheap when you can just re-spawn into another body. Not all injuries are immediately fatal, although I never seemed to be able to gain any benefit from applying one of the two bandages my soldier was carrying. Most other re-spawns were into a soldier that was standing at a window staring at the wrong end of the battlefield. More times than not, that re-spawning places you in the body of a soldier that was trapped on what looked like a treadmill as he futilely sprinted at full speed against a wall or other object. One hit can easily be enough to kill you, causing you to re-spawn into the next available warm body. The high realism level comes in with the damage model of your soldier. That said, the enemy soldiers are pretty good shots - until you learn that the safest thing to do is cower under cover while the simpletons eradicate each other, sudden death in the form of a shot fired from a distant enemy is not uncommon.Things get slightly better when you advance to the point where you earn the ability to direct some squads, but only because you can direct your troops to the appropriate area to wander around aimlessly. The enemy AI is every bit as stupid, which is the only reason your army isn’t annihilated within the first couple of minutes. You comrades in arms bumble around running into walls and each other, and every now and then manage to shoot an enemy. It’s very much like a Saturday night at Walmart: you’re convinced that you are the only sane person in the place. It is at this point it becomes painfully obvious that the single-player mode is intended to be nothing more than a training ground for the multi-player. Unfortunately the player is soon turned loose to fight the Russians for control of Stalingrad. At this point, things are looking pretty promising. The weapons and firing motions are well detailed and the voice narration has an authentic German accent. For example, the player not only learns how to fire a rifle from a few different stances, but how to adjust the gun sights to compensate for bullet drop over longer distances. It starts out well enough with a fairly standard tutorial wherein the player learns how to operate a handful of standard German army infantry weapons, but at a level of detail somewhat higher than previous games in the genre. This becomes readily apparent very early in the single-player campaign mode. In the case of Red Orchestra, Tripwire appears to be taking aim at the ultra-realistic multi-player segment. Still, even within a crowded market there is usually some niche that has been under-served. here comes one more entry into a very crowded market. Just when you thought it was safe to say that the WWII genre had run its course. This revelation will come from the recently released Tripwire FPS, Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad. It appeared for awhile that there may have been some form of more modern warfare, but in mid-2011 the WWII genre made another reappearance. His inarguable conclusion will be that the only war ever fought was from 1939 to 1945. Someday in the distant future, a doctoral student in anthropology will write a thesis on the topic of war on the planet Earth based on the only research materials still available: the National Archive of Video Games.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |