OK, as promised I’ll try to review some of my first impressions of Red Orchestra. I never saw the beta, so this is all on the basis of about 2 hours offline practice and 4 hours online play.
Installation & Characteristics
Crap, as described elsewhere. A box version is promised. However, once I got it installed it then launches and runs fine. I have been using 1152x864, fairly high graphic settings, and 32 player online is silky smooth. Some graphics anomalies if you select “roaming” view and look at the map from a birds eye view, but no issues in game.
Cheating is heavily deprecated and handled by the VAC (Valve Anti Cheat) system, which is good news. The game is specifically designed for modders and includes an editor, so expect every variant and flavour very soon.
Eyes & Ears
You want eye candy? Forget it. The graphics TBH are one or two years behind the times. They aren’t ugly, I personally find them quite acceptable. In fact, some of the maps are really quite atmospheric with the weather, lighting and ravages of war nicely modelled. But if someone says they got RO for the state of the art graphics then call them Pinocchio.
Specular shading and 3D particle modelling are complex issues. Recording “BANG” and saving it as a .wav file, on the other hand, is easy, so I think the developers have less excuse for the lack of noise in the game. It’s too quiet, as they used to say in the Westerns. On one particulalry quiet map, every time I fired my rifle I expected a load of Germans to jump up, finger on lips, and go “ssshhhhhh”. CoD2 got it about right with sound, RO hasn’t.
A side note about the visuals: allowing gore means that severe violence to your enemy’s body will actually reduce it to a pile of blood soaked offal. I feel that I should disapprove of this, but rather worryingly I don’t. Then again, I rather enjoyed “Severance” where you could chop off your opponents arm, pick it up and beat him to death with it. More sensitive human beings, or those with children, may wish to consider the gore setting.
Gameplay
If you have played any first person shooter you can pretty much guess the control keys. The default move speed can be increased to a “sprint” or reduced to a “walk”. Now, this isn’t CoD2. It’s more considered, more even paced. So the “walk” setting is like a tortoise on a zimmer frame. Forget it. Assign the key to something else, use default and sprint.
For some reason they have included a “jump” key. I always moan about this, there is no need for a “jump” key, all you need is a “climb” key that only works at climbable objects. Still, not a problem because sprinting and jumping will shag you out almost immediately, so it’s bad luck for the bunny hoppers and whirling Dervish warriors. They are going to have to learn to do it army style.
In the same way, there is no single key for rapid fire grenade spamming. You have to change to grenade, throw, change back to primary weapon. You can cook your grenades, but the one I tried must have had a duff fuse - pin out, release, count to BANG now where did my hand go?
The rest is what you would expect. The maps are big enough to make your enemy a grey dot in the distance. Last night at least most of the kills I saw were friendly fire. Mind you, it was school out time in America, and with questions like “Hey, whose are those YELLOW tanks” perhaps it wasn’t surprising. (By the way, a few seconds later the genius asking the above question had the fuse cap of an 88mm high explosive up his nose, so an explanation of Wehrmacht camouflage was considered superfluous).
The vehicles, apparently, were added at a late date, and frankly it shows. Controls are limited to forward - back - left - right. No gears or anything. Damage modelling is simplistic. And the wheeled vehicles are very top heavy - you either corner gently or end up going arse over tit. Still, I have to say I like them. The tanks look and feel right, they are very claustrophobic unless you stick your head out. And they have to be driven with care. I got one stuck in a shell hole, and another one I drove out onto a frozen river. It didn’t float. The most important thing about tanks is to get a driver who realises the diference between a T34 and a M1A1 Abrams. I had a couple of American drivers, bless 'em, doing 30kph through shell holes, yelling “Hey Pee, fire the gun man! Why aren’t you firing the gun man?”
There’s another vital fact to remember when driving a tank, apart from the fact that you should be spending most of your time NOT driving around.The landscape and objects are not destructible. For example, when I saw a German behind a flimsy wooden fence, my obvious reaction was to run him over. No such luck. The wooden fence brought my T34 to a dead stop, Fritz produced a panzerfaust and it was whoosh-bang-goodnight Vienna. All modelled objects need to be avoided - as do deep holes, steep slopes, tank obstacles and so on. Some rivers, however, can be waded, which is useful.
Some tanks allow a third crew member, this simply mans the hull machine gun. It’s a good job for the lazy or tired soldier, you get boxloads of ammo and you just brass up everything in sight.
Now, you really do need to crew your tanks and work as a team. You cannot choose your position, and you cannot change your position. First into the tank is driver. Next one in takes commander / gunner. Third one to join is hull mg. So, if you jump in a tank and drive off on your own, you cannot then stop and move to the gun position. And on the subject of teamwork, tanks do not rule the battlefield. This isn’t Kursk or North Africa. You will be in towns, villages, broken landscape, and Panzerfausts are two a penny. So you need to operate your tanks and infantry together, each supporting the other. This is one game where organised squads are going to have a big, big advantage.
That’s enough for now. As you can no doubt tell, I am impressed, it works well and has real possibilities. If I have a criticism - totally unfair of course - it is that the 32 player limit is too few. Once you have crewed your tanks and armoured cars, added your infantry squads, 16 players per side is just not enough. That’s a limitation of all online games of course, but it may mean that the devoted realism fans will favour the infantry only maps.
