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Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad unlike many first person shooter is a game that aim at giving you a realistic world war 2 experience on the Eastern Front.

The localization of the action is a welcome aspect of this series. It put you on the eastern front, a front that has been certainly one of the decisive part of the War and is largely under explored by the main stream games, if not only to reproduce scene from movies everybody saw. Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad actually put you in some important moment of the war on the eastern front and the single player experience gives you some introduction with videos that explain the context of each map that center around the battle of Stalingrad. The story of the game tend to limit itself to these videos and the singleplayer is a mirror of the multiplayer with bots. Those AI offer some good training in preparation to the real deal the multiplayer.

The action happens in a very well designed environment that seems to come out directly out of black and white film of the real event. The maps are very well done graphically and are rich in details, the texture are maybe a little dark but this give a dark war movie style to the game that seem appropriate when it comes to recreate the atmosphere of this bloody front. While the environment is largely undestructible, few spot can be blown up by engineer explosive to open some alternative path, allowing your side to advance in this very deadly environment. The lethality of the environment is due in great part to the narrow nature of the maps that rarely give you more then 3 or 4 possible ways to advance or defend. Because this game really is mostly about advancing or defending.

To advance your team need to outnumber the enemies in a zone to capture it. These zones are represented by a square on the map. To push the front you need to hold a series of zones before being able to push to the next series of zones. This principle is actually very effective at keeping the action going, forcing both side to move to these different zone to achieve victory. As a rule the hard part isn’t so much to capture the zone, but mostly to actually reach those zone. The game make you spawn pretty far away as a rule allowing the defender to entrench themselves in very easily defensible position forcing the attacking side to play tactically or simply outnumbering the defenders that will run out of ammo at some point.

It’s clear that the maps of Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad as well has the game mechanic are well design with teamplay in mind. There is plenty of cover and ways to flank the enemies, on the other hand the realistic nature of the game prevent any form of cohesion between the players, this is due to the fact that everybody die in one hit (nearly). The game allow you to spawn either at one of 2 spawn position or on the squad leader. As a rule the squad leader dies, so that usually mean you spawn at one of 2 spawn position. There are no guaranty that the rest of your squad will spawn at the same position. If they didn’t die at the same time as you, there is no point waiting for them. It’s also unlikely that they will wait for you. So the squad system of the game appear to be very much an illusion and the action generally consist at being a bunch on individually running and gunning spread out a little like Call of Duty Series and it’s a little disappointing to say the least.

In fact one of the amazing feature of the game, the cover system, should be a great teamplay enforcer. Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad offer one of the best system of cover we ever saw in a first person shooter. The most impressive aspect of this system is that it’s intuitive, effective, easy to use, fun to use and all that while keeping you inside your first person view. So you can suppress the enemies with blind fire, you can use nearly every thing as a position to increase you gun stability. You can take take a small peek and really this system is great! The only issu with this system is that if you use it, your nearly as good as dead both in single player and multiplayer.

From our experience at it, the reason why this amazing cover system turn out to be nearly useless is that Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad aiming system is actually way to easy. One of the main charm of Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45 and it’s popular mod Darkest Hour: Europe ’44-’45 was that aiming was really a pain. To actually manage to be good at it, you really have to play a lot and train yourself at it. While in Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad it’s really really easy to hit somebody even beyond 200m with a rifle even without any scope. With submachine gun you can also aim very well bellow 100m and with machinegun you can single shot the enemies from a far easily. The ease of use combined with the realistic nature of the damage those weapon gives, mean that you will die a lot playing this game. Also the fact that it’s so easy to kill your enemies as it is easy to die make the multiplayer of Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad a bit frustrating. We explain this by the fact that killing your enemies is easy and doesn’t give you much of a reward, while dying so easily is frustrating. The multiplayer experience as a result gives more frustration then pleasure in the end and it’s a fairly surprising result since the game main focus is the multiplayer. Such a “frustrating” result probably could have been avoided by randomizing the bullets spread and could have been justified by wind or poor quality of weapon due to the cold or something. One thing is sure the game feel little a like the original and the firefights are usually short and rarely feel satisfying especially in the context where the team play is nearly none existent and useless.

To conclude this game is well done, visually the game look good but the requirement to run it smoothly seems a bit high. The cover system did impress us a lot and it’s just a shame that it doesn’t turn out to be an effective way to fight in the multiplayer. The multiplayer is well design but the nature of the aiming system turn what could be a fun experience into something fairly frustrating. One thing is sure Tripwire seem to be determined to support the game well and address the community complain and they have already released many updates that have fix many issue. They will also release a DLC that focus on the pacific theater. So we are looking forward to where Tripwire Interactive with lead the game base on all the community feedback they received since the release.

As soon as i started this game, 20 people in my steam list asked if it was good. Well instead of explaining i guess it best to show it. Essentially this video show 1 of the main quest that advance the story line. Note that in this videos I cuted a good potion of the fight against the Thugs at the beginning. because i didn’t had much to fight them and that took forever… Also in this game you can modified you weapons, something that i actually didn’t used yet at that point. Other then that i think this videos pretty much cover most aspect of what the game has to offer. The only thing missing are guns that you get much later on in the campaign. But the main focus of the game remain a very bloody melee combat action.

Red Orchestra 2 Heroes of Stalingrad Closed Beta Gameplay show a couple of good moment i had last night as i was axis defending against the allies attack. At the begining i was using a smg mp-40. But switched to the good old bolt rifle kar98k leading to some very nice moment. So i hope you will enjoy this 25 min of intense action on a 64 players game. I deceided to cut the waiting time after i died to save some time and space. Enjoy! =D

Red Orchestra 2 Heroes of Stalingrad is a realistic WW2 fps that follow in the foot step of Red Orchestra: Ostfont 41-45 and it’s popular mod Darkess Hours. This new game in the series offer better graphic and gameplay experience. One of the innovation this game offer is a cover system that keep you in fps that remain smooth and intuitive. The game also include suppression effect, specific wound and damage system that insure that it hurt where it hit. There is also a leveling up process that make you character become even more effective and also allow to until item. The game favor teamplay and mutual support. A single man can’t do much against a well organized team. So it’s a good looking game so far.

Red Orchestra 2 Heroes of Stalingrad is a realistic WW2 fps that follow in the foot step of Red Orchestra: Ostfont 41-45 and it’s popular mod Darkess Hours. This new game in the series offer better graphic and gameplay experience. One of the innovation this game offer is a cover system that keep you in fps that remain smooth and intuitive. The game also include suppression effect, specific wound and damage system that insure that it hurt where it hit. There is also a leveling up process that make you character become even more effective and also allow to until item. The game favor teamplay and mutual support. A single man can’t do much against a well organized team. So it’s a good looking game so far.