Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad is a WWII FPS and the sequel of Red Orchestra: Ostfront from Tripwire Interactive that is a cut apart from the current flock ofFPS Mil shooters such as the Call of Duty and Battlefield franchises on the market today. Tripwire is aiming high trying to market to both the realism crowd and the easy accessibility crowd. Let’s see how things stack up.


Concept

Moving away from the tired D-Day invasions, Heroes of Stalingrad is a World War II FPS that has both a single player campaign representing the Axis (aka the Germans) and the Allies (aka the Soviets) during the height of WW2 in 1942-43 after Hitler invaded Russia and got as far as Stalingrad. The fighting takes place in various locations in and around Stalingrad itself, which at this time was mostly a pile of rubble.

HoS does have a single and multiplayer component, with the single player portion being dished out with some minimal cut scenes between maps. HoS has you fighting against bots with a German and Soviet campaign each but the primary focus on the game is multiplayer.

Graphics

Using the Unreal 3 engine, there have been some great updates to the overall graphics of HoS. Stalingrad looks like a seriously pounded city with large multi-level bombed out buildings in some maps, to wide open spaces that are terrifying to try to cross. Debris litter the area as expected, much of which is used by the players to provide cover and concealment (which is where you WILL spend most of your time). The artists have captured the atmosphere pretty well and give you a sense of foreboding when trying to navigate all the ruins and structures. The color schemes seem to fit well with a Soviet era motif; basically drab greys and browns with the occasional picture of Stalin on a wall colored in red.

Player models are well defined and look pretty authentic. One area that is very hard to get used to is while the models for the Germans and Russians look good, it’s very hard to differentiate between friend or foe since both sides tend to use similar browns and greys in the heat of combat. I found myself shooting friendlies all the time until I got an eye for the overall outline of the models.

The map sizes are quite large and scale well for large battles without giving the sense that you are in a sandbox. I didn’t find myself bumping into the ‘edge’ of the map too often.

Sound

Overall I thought the sound quality is quite good. The weapons fire fits well with the weapon types with them not being over the top, and grenades explode with just the right amount of power instead of like a 500lb bomb going off. Even the music score is excellent. Most of the time I turn the music off in a game I actually like it enough to keep it on for a change as I think it adds to the game. Player characters will be often heard shouting and issue a number of statements and yells that contribute quite a bit to the overall impression that you are in a real warzone and in close quarters fighting. Nicely done.

Gameplay

If there was one word that I could use to summarize the gameplay it would be; HARD. This is one of the most unforgiving games that I have played, including ArmA, Operation Flashpoint, and certainly Battlefield. Most of your time is spent looking for the next area of cover, how to make a quick escape, and trying to line up a quick shot before you get taken down. Now that sounds like pretty much every other shooter out there, but in this game, if you get hit once, 9 of 10 times that means you’re dead. I think that the average lifespan for me was about 4 seconds and I’m not new to this type of game (of course your mileage may vary J ). I have to admit that I was frustrated many times when I would spawn and be instantly killed. Come on guys – haven’t we taken care of spawn camping yet in these types of games?
Tripwire put in a single player component that pretty much gets you ready for multiplayer. While it’s not comprehensive, credit is due for even adding it. There are some short cut scenes added between maps that try to build a story to follow with quotes from soldiers that fought in Stalingrad that attempt to give a real world flavor and I liked that. The bots you fight against are – well – bots. Not real intelligent and played just the way I recall from playing Unreal Tournament back in the day.

64 person multiplayer is quite different with living breathing players as infantry or with tanks. The typical classes are found here like rifleman, sniper, machine gunner, etc. There also roles for pIayers like a commander which can call down artillery strikes, send in recon planes, mortars, and force players to respawn. There are also squad leaders than can use binocular to mark targets for the commander so they can radio in for artillery on a marked target. HoS has a leveling system in place to unlock weapons and upgrades however it is quite buggy at this time and will likely be fixed in an upcoming patch.

Did I mention tanks? I have a soft spot for tanks and they fit well into Red Orchestra 2. However, if you expect to be able to just jump in and man all the postions at once or use it solely as personal transport and be a Blue Falcon, then you’ll be disappointed! For full capability, you will need a crew of players; commander, driver, main gunner, machine gunner. Gameplay can really shine if you have a good crew but if you get a moron that can’t drive at all, well you’re not going to have too much fun.

I found that if I wasn’t hiding I was running top speed to the next firing position and even then I would not stay still long because you constantly feel exposed; in a word, pretty frantic. There was a real sense of danger wherever you were at, nowhere is safe as one bullet frequently takes you out. Combat revolves around capturing certain areas on each map like we’ve seen before. Capturing requires a team to eliminate the OpFor from the area in order to capture it. In my opinion, I wish there was a clearer method of securing an area that may contain a capture and hold element. The game basically points to waypoint which you fight over without there being an actual object to secure or otherwise and would sometimes take a while to root out the last player that is hiding in some debris.

Movement and the controls are quite responsive. Weapon handling is good and feels right. There are no GUI counters showing how much ammo you have which I liked quite a bit as I would count the rounds I fired so that I’d be ready to reload with the next clip for many of the bolt action rifles in the game. The ability to lock on to cover was pretty easy to do so that I could pop up and fire without over exposing myself. Your player has the ability to stand, crouch and go prone. You can also sprint in a crouching position which is cool and even better can go from a prone to sprinting movement and back to prone very easily – nice touch there.

Replayability

If you like it fast and furious, then it’s likely you will keep playing. An area that has hurt HoS is bugginess. There have been many issues regarding lag in the network code, another one that when a player would alt-tab out of the game and then back, the FPS would drop quite a bit, to graphic glitches and others. Additionally, Tripwire wiped all the multiplayer stats and reset everyone to zero points losing all players upgrades due to a but in the scoring system. They have doubled the XP earned to help players get back to where they were before faster but this has angered some of the community as you could imagine.

Value

Tripwire has announced they will be including new DLC content, more maps and weapons in upcoming patches for free. They have a good track record in this area from the first Red Orchestra game so I’d expect more goodness to come.
Final Intelligence Report

Overall I think Tripwire has done a pretty good job and can offer a good alternative to what’s out there now. The gameplay is fast and brutal and at first you will die, A LOT. But once you get the controls down and begin to really get a feel for the difficulty, Red Orchastra 2: HoS is quite satisfying. One area that has hurt this release, and with many others, is glitches. Tripwire has already released several patches that have gone a long way to fix quite a few of the problems and I’d expect the game to mature quite nicely pretty soon.

Final Score: 3.7 out of 5

HOS still has a chance if it can keep its player base, do some free weekends, release some free DLC and some good deals on steam it could recover.

But if the reviews are that good then why the massive drop in players numbers. And will only get lower in the next coming month. If the game was as good as the reviews say it is then more people would have gone out and bought it and played it. But the numbers fell very quickly and have not even managed to go up to 50% of its peak.
They can throw all the free DLC at the game but that does not help them for the future. I would be seriously worried for TWI's next game as this one has lost alot of the community that it did have and it will effect it for future releases.

The best review are player numbers if a game is good then people play it and the numbers go up.

I admire what TWI tried to do but they did not have a great business plan in effect. Releasing so close to two AAA games was not smart. The lack of free advertising they could have used. The lack of any advertising before launch also effected their sales. For a company that is not the "new kid on the block" they should have known a little better. I think as a whole they have hurt themselves with the release of HOS and only time will tell if they can recover.

I think a lot of the 10 thousand that came to RO2, came expecting the COD/BF "point 'n click" game.
What they found was themselves being massacred and not being able to take it. It is a very hard game to get into. I too am sorry it ever got compared to COD as it did them no favours at all...apart from selling more units day 1.

JC even posted here, in this very forum, comments to the article where he moved away from calling it a COD killer. He knows what he's been spending the last 5 years doing and it was not spent creating COD v2.0.1.

We can bash (no pun intended) RO2 for bugs, lack of marketing and whatever else we want, but even this release did not go anywhere near the failure day 1 that was Black Ops. So IMO, the player drop is more than likely down to gamers not liking the learning curve.