Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad

I look down at my sniper rifle and I’m like: ‘You idiot! This thing has iron sights on it.’ If I’d have just looked through the iron sights [instead of trying to line up the scope]—it was 10 feet away—it would’ve been an easy shot. So, I’m standing there in the middle of this field, and thinking ‘We need to add that into RO2.’

The entire Tripwire staff is playing with us—a 10-map mini-war where Axis and Allies attack and defend to capture and hold territory, or whittle down each other’s army count (your total deaths as a team is subtracted from an overall number—you’ll lose more if you’re on the attacking side). It’s like playing a Risk metagame between rounds, and the urgency of capturing a territory lends a great sense of importance to each round, even if you’ve played that map a dozen times.

There’s no on-screen counter for bullets; you hold the R key to swipe the clip from your weapon, and a message reports if the clip feels heavy or light. The mechanic is in place, Gibson says, to generate tension. “Little moments of panic are why we enjoy being scared by movies or amusement park rides. For too long I feel that multiplayer shooter designers have only been trying to give players joy. Now is the time to stop feeding FPS players only cotton candy, and give them some steak and potatoes along with the sweet stuff.”

You can take cover behind almost every surface in the game, but levels aren’t filled with convenient shoulder-high bits of concrete—a barrier might only cover your torso and neck from the enemy.

Blind fire is actually blind—if you stick your gun over that pile of bricks to scare an enemy away, you won’t see what you’re firing at.

Machine guns aren’t simply faster-firing, heavier rifles: they can be deployed to any patch of earth, ledge or windowsill on the map to create a firing position.

More than 10 separately-housed systems can be picked apart. In my final tank fight, I’d lost my engine, but my enemy hadn’t bothered to finish me. Immobilized, I swapped to the gunner seat (transitioned by a Mirror’s Edge-style crouch-crawl through the cockpit in first-person), shoved my dead crewmate aside, and scrounged a kill on the turret.

nothing07 said: The guy presenting that video is such an idiot.

Hugz said: If this game is anything like CoD... I'm not interested.

Skarteh said:

Hugz said: If this game is anything like CoD... I'm not interested.

Dude it's about as far off COD as you could get

MyFragian said: I just noticed this on its store page "Low Violence: Low Violence Version". I dont remember seeing that this morning

We've put "LV" up for Australia because we haven't got the rating back yet - and dear old Oz has just announced the new higher rating category. We are HOPING that they will take the same view as PEGI/BBFC and NOT go all silly on us. However, until we're sure, we putting LV up to be safe. The Okkers may want to wait a few days and see what the end result is - but we'd hate for you to buy it and THEN find your ratings board can't cope with dismemberment (like USK...).
[...]
Update on this one: I've just been told by someone in the industry in Oz that the new 18 rating will NOT be "operational" until later this year. This implies that we'll have to accept the cuts to get the 15+ rating - or no release in Oz.

Watch this space for further (joyous) updates...