![]() ![]() ![]() When you’ve been stuck in Spectator mode for the best part of five minutes, and you spawn only to be killed thirty seconds later by an enemy that you never had a chance of spotting, it’s a real momentum killer.įortunately, you can knock together a pseudo-single-player experience by playing cooperative matches locally with AI squad mates. Death, meanwhile, can come extremely quickly, often coming down to who sees who first. It could be less than a minute, but it could also be far longer. The problem is that when you die, you’re then stuck waiting for an unspecified amount of time. Also, it makes for some wonderful moments of heroism when the last man standing manages to capture an objective, bringing the entire team back into play. Firstly it means you spawn as a team that can coordinate rather than a constant drip-feed of cannon fodder. When you die, you can only respawn when your team captures an objective, at which point your entire team respawns at once. The problem is more to do with the amount of downtime in multiplayer. This isn’t necessarily because it’s challenging, although I will admit to being thoroughly outclassed by the game’s ridiculously competent player-base. Insurgency feels pretty good beneath the fingers too, providing enough weight to movement and aiming to feel authentic, but not to the point where the game becomes difficult to control.įor all its quality, however, I find Insurgency’s multiplayer difficult to enjoy. When the battle is in full flow, it is incredibly intense. Where Battlefield is very flashy, Insurgency is grittier, earthier, less cinematic. I would say that Insurgency approaches Battlefield levels of quality, but it’s not an entirely fair comparison. If an enemy commander drops an artillery barrage on your head, the noise of it is truly phenomenal. Meanwhile, explosions have a terrifyingly deep crunch that sends dirt and debris and body parts flying in all directions. There must be a hundred different noises for bullets hitting different kinds of material, from sandbags to corrugated iron to wire fencing. Rising Storm wasn’t exactly lacking in this area either, but Insurgency is on another level. Where Insurgency has the edge on Rising Storm is in its audio/visual design. At the top of your team’s tree is the Commander, who can use binoculars to call in various kinds of support ranging from helicopter gunships to pummelling artillery. You can have as many vanilla riflemen as you want, but only one sniper and a couple of heavy machine-gunners. The unranked multi splits up two teams of 16 players into several soldier classes. In terms of play, Insurgency’s closest neighbour is Tripwire’s Rising Storm. The unranked multiplayer offers its own variants of team deathmatch and objective-based modes, while the ranked multiplayer is a purist 5v5 twitch-out. There’s a cooperative mode that sees you join up with other players against AI enemies, alongside ranked and unranked multiplayer modes. Instead, Sandstorm offers three courses of multiplayer. The only downside to this mission is the rather sluggish AI, which I suspect to be the reason behind Sandstorm’s lack of a broader single-player campaign. Commencing with you alone in the streets of a nondescript middle-eastern town, it gradually scales up to a defensive battle against a platoon of Insurgents as they attempt to cross a bridge. The closest you get is a brief single-player tutorial mission, which happens to be one of the best tutorial missions I’ve ever played. On launch, however, there is no story mode. It sounded amazing, a hybrid of Call of Duty and ArmA III with a character-driven core. In it, you played a female leader of an Iraqi militia who seeks to take back her home town from hostile Insurgents. A couple of years ago I spoke with the lead developer of Sandstorm, and he told me all about the single-player campaign they were working on. It’s also, frankly, a bit light on features. ![]() This undeniably spectacularly multiplayer FPS is also gruelling to the point of being traumatic, and if you don’t have eyes like a telescopic eagle, you’re going to spend a lot of time sat around watching other people having fun. I wish I could like Insurgency: Sandstorm, but unfortunately I bounced off it harder than a bullet off the side of a tank. ![]()
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