This marks xTYBALTx's first official review for Tactical Gamer, and I can bet it won't be his last! Take it away xTYBALTx!
Tripwire’s commercial release of
Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45 has been received by members of our community with various amounts of disdain, indifference, and enamor.
The much-touted realistic modeling of player movements, weapon ballistics, and vehicle interactions led many to believe that the game would be a perfect fit for us at
TG, whilst others say the game simply isn’t enjoyable or isn’t conducive to the coordinated teamplay we’ve become accustomed to.
In this review, I attempt to mix my personal impressions and thoughts of RO with some objective analysis.
The Beginning
In the beginning
Newcomers are often advised that Red Orchestra sports a mean learning curve, but I’ve not personally found this to be the case.
After messing around with bots on a private server for a few minutes, I had a firm grasp of the basic infantry controls and it took just a short stint in a tank to figure that side of the game out. Anyone who has experience with the America’s Army series should be comfortable with RO in short order.
Most aspects of RO work precisely as one would expect; crouching makes aiming easier than standing, prone even more so. Leaning degrades stability slightly, whilst resting your weapon on a suitable object increases it dramatically.
RO provides three channels of voice communication (public, team, and local), and the local channel allows all players, friend or foe, to hear you if they are close enough. I thought that was a nice touch.
Gameplay
A title can have all of the features in the world, but if it doesn’t come together to form an enjoyable and immersive experience, it’ll all be for naught.
On this subject, I have a few major observations.
Each map provides a starting area for each team as well as a few objectives. The objectives are the centerpiece of every map; once a team has taken control of its assigned objectives, the round ends immediately.
While this may sound nice on paper, it often leads to a disconnected feeling for the player.
Let’s take Basovka, with its wheatfields and bunker complex, as a case in point. For those who haven’t played RO yet, this map is one of the more popular ones and features the Russkies defending three objectives from the get-go. As a Russian, it’s not unusual for the map to end abruptly right in the midst of a valiant defense of the final objective. Perhaps you’re standing right outside the “cap area,” perhaps you’re walking right into it, or maybe you’re rushing towards the objective with a group of three other soldiers. Whatever the situation, it is not enjoyable, and not immersive for the action-filled round to unexpectedly end. This is made worse by the fact that there are neither visual nor audio cues catching your attention when the objective begins to be taken.
Every game that places a premium on realism, particularly insofar as damage modeling is concerned, has a common weakness: the player’s ability to pick out tiny differences in color from unrealistically long distances. Think you’re concealed behind that bush? Sorry, I spotted your toe sticking out from one hundred meters. Two shots to your toe and you’re dead.
I see you!
To be fair, RO deals with this better with than other games and there are certain times when spotting seems to act as it should (it’s difficult to spot Germans on Baksan Valley, and the wheat fields of many maps provide realistic cover).
Activating HDR bloom addresses this problem, but unless everyone has it on (and no one does), it’s not very effective. Additionally, HDR bloom seems to degrade the appearance of everything. My ideal engine would “smear” adjacent objects together, just as the human eye/brain seems to do. Perhaps I could best sum up this issue by saying that players and player-operated vehicles seem to “glow” in relation to the inanimate objects surrounding them.
The “feel” of RO is often a bit awkward and clumsy. Sure, in real life humans are clumsy and awkward, but this is different. If I see an enemy in real life, I can drop to one knee and sight my rifle simultaneously (I know this from years of paintball and hunting). In RO, I can only do one at a time.
Take a corner to tight whilst driving a tank and you’re liable to experience an utterly instantaneous stop as the tank gets caught on the wooden fence which lines the road. In “realistic” terms, I should be able to drive through not only the wooden fence but the small farmhouse which it encircles. Instead, I need to spend at least fifteen seconds unstucking myself from this fence.
The fence always wins!
Anyone who logs some time in this game will experience numerous little bugs like this.
The Shadow of Battlefield
For now, every game is measured relative to Battlefield 2.
BF2 includes a slick VOIP package and integrates squad organization, command structure, and commander functions seamlessly. The ability to keep squads together has done wonders for our gaming community (indeed, I believe it attracted many of us here) and is probably one of the greatest innovations in the genre for the past few years.
Those of us who’ve grown accustomed to gaming in tight, organized groups may find RO’s gameplay, well, loose and unorganized. Direction comes in the form of general orders; either “rally points” indicated on the map and personal compass, or spoken/typed orders such as “Everyone fall back and defend the command bunker.”
While it may seem that we should be able to organize effectively, the fact of the matter is that RO simply does not provide the kind of teamplay many of us like.
Maps are the Key
It has been my experience that the amount of fun I have with RO is directly related to the map I’m playing. Certain maps “feel” right whilst others don’t lend themselves well to the style of play RO encourages. Particularly, I find that maps which funnel both sides into narrow choke points particularly weak – RO needs wide, open maps where the fighting is spread out and diverse to be at it’s best.
Odessa - Urban, all infantry. Fighting is concentrated around a couple of key plazas and parkways. One of my least favorite maps.
Koening-Platz - Small amounts of heavy armor, combined arms. Very wide open map despite being relatively small, linear, and flat. Quite fun.
Kaukasus - All infantry. Both sides are funneled into a few choke points. Very little freedom of movement. Nearly impossible to successfully assault the monastery if it’s the last objective. Perhaps the worst map in RO.
Arad – Dominated by lots of heavy armor. Impassible forests in the center and border of the map funnels both sides into precisely two choke points. While it can be fun, and the two towns in the map break up the firing lanes a bit, this is not the best armor map RO offers.
Baksan Valley – Winter infantry map with two large hills and valleys. Pretty good map. The fighting can get intense, but there isn’t enough peripheral maneuvering room for my tastes.
Barashka - Lots of heavy armor. Two bridges dominate the map, but armor can cross the frozen river as well. This map can have some fantastic moments. For those looking for a challenge, I recommend crossing the river and ambushing T-34’s with Panzerfausts
Basouka – Infantry map. Wheat fields surrounding a complex of trenches and bunkers. This map is one of my favorites. This is how every infantry map in RO should play.
Krasnyi Oktyabr – Industrial/warehouse infantry map. I’m not fond of this one.
Stalingrad Kessel – Urban infantry map. One of the greater urban maps, but still one of the lesser overall maps.
Hedgehog – One piece of light armor per side, three good objectives, and great combined arms fighting. This map is a gem.
Rakowice – Fight over a demolished German airbase with some armor mixed in. This is a very decent map.
Ogledow – Lots and lots of heavy armor. Rolling hills break up the fighting and sight lanes, making for a pretty fun and tactical experience. The best armor dominated map.
Bondaravo – Lots of light armor, somewhat strange layout, but fun nonetheless.
Anything Else?
Why, yes, and I’m glad you asked!
Most of Red Orchestra’s sound effects are quite good, and add to the realism: tank engines sputter as they turn over, the ominous sound of a tank turret rotating is audible from forty meters, and bullets whizzing over your head will make you duck in your chair. Some effects, however, are a bit weak: firing the
panzerfaust feels more like flinging a wet noodle than a rocket – and there is no effect, visual nor audio, upon impact.
Visually, Red Orchestra is behind the times: much of the foliage, trees, bushes, and wheat fields simply look dated and flimsy. Worst of all, “forests” are not comprised of many individual trees but a big green impassable barrier. Operation Flashpoint from 2001 had dense forests. Why doesn’t Red Orchestra?
Even the trees are tough on the Eastern Front!
Infantry motions appear awkward and fake, mounting and dismounting vehicles occurs instantly – despite Planetside’s implementation of smoothly animated vehicle mounts in mid 2003. It would be nice if tankers had to open the hatch and slowly climb out of their vehicles – in full view of their enemies – instead of simply appearing out of thin air next to the vehicle, weapon at the ready.
Many of the buildings look decent from certain angles but fake and contrived from others.
Despite the visual drawbacks, RO does a surprisingly good job of coming together to form nice environments. Sure, the textures on Hedgehog’s farmhouse textures and wheat stalks may look fake, its trees and bushes two dimensional, but when everything is put together, the sum is more than the parts: Hedgehog has a nice, authentic feel to it.
It feels like you’re in a Ukrainian farming community, even if some of the details don’t stand on their own.
So What’s the Deal?
Overall, I’d say Red Orchestra is a fine game, and if Battlefield 2 didn’t exist, it’d be a great game. Alas, Battlefield has been around for neigh a year now, and our community has grown accustomed to a certain level of tactical gameplay which RO has not delivered.
I don’t know why for sure, and there are several opinions out there, but I suspect that the inability to keep squads together after the loss of a couple members is the primary item keeping teamwork at bay.
Adding to the difficulties are frequent bugs with the in-game VOIP and the inability to tell where your teammates are via a Counter-Strike or Battlefield-esque minimap; a problem compounded by identify-friend-or-foe (IFF) tags which aren’t legible outside ten to twenty meters.
Even without organized squads, teamwork should occur on smaller levels. For example, if I see two enemies firing at me from behind a wall, I should be able to ask the fellow next to me for covering fire while I run for a flanking position. But this never seems to happen, and I don’t know why.
Many of the items I’ve listed as drawbacks may be required parts of a game which attempts to simulate infantry conflicts. Real life infantry often don’t know what’s going on a few hundred meters from them, I imagine. But it is most certainly not realistic to go into battle alone and without any organized command structure.
Because of these issues, RO will be relegated to “backup” status for me. I have fun hopping on a public server and doing my thing, whether that be commanding and dropping arty on my foes (which, by the way, is very well implemented in game and quite fun ), sniping from a distance, driving a tank, or ambushing steel behemoths with my
panzerfaust.
Yet while RO offers a diverse range of experiences, it lacks the polish and teamplay required to be a “complete” game.
While infantry are drawn to points, I wouldn't call them "choke points." Except for the monastery, there are many different ways to assault each of the different points, and the map is very open and doesn't lend itself to choking. And my team and I have taken the monastery multiple times. It takes coordination and teamwork. It's funny that the maps that seems to require us to play most like Tactical Gamers (ones where you can only succeed if the whole team is behind you) are the ones that get a bad rap.
