Insurgency Review
Insurgency by New World Interactive is a multiplayer squad-based military game available on Steam. The game puts you in the middle of the action, close quarters, fighting enemies with a generous arsenal of weaponry in all major classes. If you’ve played Call of Duty or any other number of other first person shooter, real-time military multiplayer games, you’ll feel right at home here.
There is a tutorial mission which walks you though the basics, but you can just as easily jump on in and learn as you go. The tutorial instructor (seen past the scope of my weapon here) will do a funny dance when you run into him, as I discovered by accident (pretty sure this is a bug).
The various multiplayer modes include Firefight, Search and Destroy, VIP Escort, Push, Skirmish, Strive, and a Checkpoint mode which is co-op versus AI. I tried a few modes, and spend lots of time dying. You may too, because Insurgency is a game where it’s easy to die. 1-2 shots and you’re gone, even with body armor. If you like stealth, hiding, sniping, and surprising your prey – you might last far longer than I did! I enjoy FPS games, but the limited health (maybe too realistic?) made me change my usual gameplay habbits with this type of game.
I tried the co-op mode a few times, in various beautifully rendered maps (well, beautiful from a distance, when you get too close the textures show every pixel). Overall I was impressed with the visuals and the game ran as smooth as butter (even on my 2 year hold midrange video card, a Nvidia GeForce GTX 550Ti). But while the visuals ran great, the soundtrack is fairly mundane – some intro music but other than that just the sound of bullets flying everywhere and the occasional grenade blast. Not every game needs a revolving soundtrack like GTA, but just a little more variety would be welcome!
In terms of game play, my best advice is that speed matters in this game, so you better be quick with the keyboard and mouse. One down side is that the game doesn’t appear to support the standard wired xbox 360 controller. For the die-hard mouse and keyboard fans that’s not an issue, but I for one am much better with a controller and would like the option to use that. Speed matters in this game, so anything to make your responses quicker will work to your benefit.
The maps are interesting and varied with lots of good hiding and sniping locations. Most are modeled after middle-eastern-looking towns and villages, clearly meant to represent front line firefights in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. To succeed you have to work as a team. For one, once you’re dead you won’t re-spawn until one of your buddies comes to help. Also each player has a unique role, for example Specialist, Sniper, Rifleman, etc. Certain objectives require a team-mate’s specialized skills to achieve.
Standard multiplayer disclaimers apply – If you’re easily offended by fart jokes, racist impersonations, and lots of blood this game definitely isn’t for you.
The game ran well overall but I did encounter a few bugs. More than once my character froze up or started shaking like he had too much caffeine, typically if the server connection was interrupted. Hopefully future patches will take care of this. Also as previously mentioned the tutorial instructor had some odd behaviors, and I noticed clipping when I walked toward him (usually causing him to shake uncontrollably).
Overall if you are a die hard squad-based military multiplayer fan, this game is definitely for you! And for $14.99 for the starter pack, it’s not a bad price either. However if shooting your way through the middle east with a squad of foul-mouthed bad-asses isn’t your thing, or if you prefer single player campaigns, you might look around before plunking down your hard earned dollars.
