When
setting out to make a sequel to their debut game, Red Orchestra: Ostfront
41-45, developers Tripwire Interactive strived to make a brutal, unrelenting
depiction of one of the bloodiest battles in human history.
Only the third game to be made by the developers, following the team’s breakout
success in a competition, of all things, Red Orchestra 2 lives up to its
promises and is easily one of the grittiest feeling games I’ve ever played.
Immersion is key in a game like Heroes of Stalingrad, immersion, after all, can
make or break a game, and Red Orchestra 2 can immerse you brilliantly in the
horrific brutality of Stalingrad. In the singleplayer campaign or a well
populated multiplayer game, you’ll fight fiercely and bleed for every inch of
ground you try and seize.
Many of these skirmishes take place in the cramped corridors of bombed out
buildings, where you’ll react to movement by sheer reflex with no time to think
about your actions. The added option to manually rack the bolt of a standard
service rifle such as the German K98k or Russian Mosin-Nagant adds to this. If
you miss your first shot in a close quarters fight, your only option may be to
use your rifle like a club, or be beaten by an enemy with an automatic weapon.
Added to this is a feeling of horror. Whether you’re in a full blown firefight
or creeping through an enemy held building, the atmosphere is all around you.
Gunshots, artillery explosions, screams and cries from both your side and the
enemy will fill the air. There’s a horrible feeling that humanizes the violence
seen tossed around willy-nilly in most games, an enemy will occasionally lie,
writhing on the ground and filling your head with the sounds of their last
choking breath, or sickening gargles as their lungs fill with blood.
The usually emotionless shells of multiplayer characters will be able to
comment on most things that happen in the game. If your stamina runs low,
they’ll pant and mutter breathlessly about how they need to rest. If your side
is taking heavy losses, cries of despair will ring out from all angles, there
may be anger over a murdered comrade, or simply a bestial scream as you swing a
rifle at a foeman’s head.
This, combined with how unpredictable your deaths can be, a rifle butt to the
back of the head, or a bullet tearing into your chest as you round a corner,
keep you on edge at almost all times. And overriding the music of death is the
game’s orchestral score, with separate themes for the Russian and German armies
that switch depending on how the battle goes. The music is typical of any game
or film set on the Eastern Front, and although it isn’t particularly memorable,
it provides an excellent backing to the grim setting of Stalingrad.
Particular detail has been paid to the setting, with Tripwire employees flying
out to the city now known as Volgograd to dig up photographs and floor plans of
buildings at the time of the battle, and the maps really do shine this
particular devotion. Buildings range from the small and relatively intact, to
huge concrete behemoths and places that may once have been factories, but are
now just a pile of framework and rubble.
This attention to detail is obviously helped by the games graphics and
aesthetics. Though the latter can
sometimes take away from the former. It’s hard to appreciate how good the game
can look sometimes when it’s layered in dirt and grit, with the washed out
brown colourings that are so prevalent in the shooter genre.
Heroes of Stalingrad is rather more honest than some of its more mainstream
rivals though. There’s no doubt it focuses on multiplayer. Singleplayer isn’t
just a tacked on feature, it’s simply a tutorial. It’s not just obvious, it’s
completely transparent. The two campaigns, one for each faction, are
entertaining to a point, but the vapid AI controlled bots lack any of the guile
that a human opponent will have.
The highlight of the single-player comes in the small cutscenes between
chapters, where excerpts from the soldiers’ diaries are read by the game’s
voice actors, accompanied by Sam Hulick’s score and the same piece of artwork.
It’s a lazy approach, but it helps build the all-important atmosphere, and it’s
a decent touch for a game that has absolutely no story or characters to speak
of. The only recurring characters are the unseen German and Russian men who
give you your briefings before each mission, and they’re not even given names.
So truly, the game is meant to be played as a multiplayer experience. Which
generally has a good array of choices that can suit almost any play style. Having
dabbled with Ostfront 41-45, I expected myself to be a crack shot with a bolt
action rifle, every attempt to use an SMG in the previous game had lead to me
firing a wildly inaccurate burst of shots that flew just about everywhere but
where I was aiming.
The opposite of this was true in Heroes of Stalingrad. Every shot I fired with
a supposedly trusty rifle went wide, or fell short, or simply failed to disable
my enemy, until I started playing as the assault class, making myself into a
highly mobile, close quarters fighting machine, mowing down rooms of enemies
with short, deadly bursts of automatic fire.
As well as the game mechanics work, however, there’s a prevalent feeling that
the game is missing a huge chunk of what made its previous incarnation great.
There are two vehicles you can crew, which are beautifully modelled both
interior and exterior, but don’t really provide much in the way of tactics
beyond your usual use of tanks.
In addition to this, there’s not much in the way of a commander system. You’ll
find yourself running around acting on your own initiative, there’s no-one
co-ordinating your team into focussed assaults and massed rushes to take
heavily defended positions.
There are certainly less maps in Stalingrad, and most are a lot smaller than
their Ostfront counterparts. Narrow, ruined streets having replaced the wide
open plains and forests of the last game, and it feels slightly poorer for it.
The final word on Heroes of Stalingrad has to be a good one. The game looks
good, feels satisfying and has an atmosphere that no other game of its genre
can really boast. It portrays a brutal time in human history with sometimes
harrowing accuracy.
Bullets have as much impact as they can without your PC reaching out and
punching you, shots that narrowly whizz past you and explosions in your area
will distort your hearing, and suppress and shellshock you. A bullet wound will
cause you to bleed if it isn’t patched up, and even if you try, you might fade
out quicker than you can react.
Gamers who enjoy titles such as ArmA and other war sims and tactical shooters
will no doubt want to give Red Orchestra a try, it balances gameplay and polish
with realism perfectly, you can run and gun if you’re good enough, and at close
range, even firing from the hip is a viable tactic, but caution is advised, and
at longer ranges the game employs previously unseen features in the genre, such
as being able to zero your sights to compensate for bullet drop.
It’s a previously unseen niche for World War II realism, and definitely well
worth a look.
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