Mateo

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.

Drizzid

Sounds like a very fair and objective review Tybalt Good job and thanks for the information

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MilesTeg

Yeah I don't like either. In fact I was never fond of how RO modeled first person infantry movement even back during the mod days. I guess on the bright side though it cuts back on the Quake Rambo tactics that you see in other shooters.

jackmacokc

Excellent review. I, like many, particularly like the local voip function. If we can take anything good from this game for future development - I hope its this. It adds so much more realism to the game.

In the future, I'd like to see where you could somehow hand gesture and whisper in-game. Just to give it the sense of realism that "local" voip does...becuase lets face it - in real life, there is no V and B key. Unless you're Robocop.

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Bananajuice

kind of harsh i think. This game plays just as good as any game out there. Its not battlefield, its RO.

people just need to play as a team and take time. its has all the voice options and all the map displays needed. The artiliery is just something to see, the death animations are top notch. There are some problems with cover, nothing to bad, just alittle off at times.

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Kaine904

Wonderful review, very much online with alot of our feelings. I'm just kind of disapointed... i thought this would replace BF2 for me.. but it only makes me miss it.
-Kaine

Bananajuice

why would it replace it? it doesnt have to. buts Its worth playing and having fun with it.

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Coridon

Excellent writeup, Tybalt!

Yeah, I liked Hedgehog a lot, too, until the last time I played as a German tanker (1st time on that map) and hit 10+ Russians with HE shells/MG fire and killed only one. I have a hard time playing with the knowledge there's a bug that severe on a particular map...

Seems cheap to run up to the German tank with a satchel charge knowing he can't hurt you, IMO.

xTYBALTx

Thank you for the kind comments everyone

Coridon, is that in fact a bug specific to Hedgehog? I've noticed similar tank vs. infantry bugs on other maps but have also killed many infantry with the German tank on Hedgehog. This title seems to have some issues with either hit detection or with not showing terrain blocking your shot in certain circumstances. Or both, I suppose.

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Coridon

Oh, I don't know...it's from personal experience. One of the last times I played the game (maybe eight or nine days ago) I was drilling infantry with HE rounds on that map and it had absolutely no impact on them. One guys was "hiding" behind a four inch thick sappling and even though I could see 98% of his body I couldn't kill him. Most of the guys were just running across the road I was on so I was blasting them with the MG and HE rounds and I don't think I killed a single one. I remember thinking I should reboot but somehow I managed to kill a single infantryman towards the end, so that just confused me even more.

I'm easily discombobulated.

TychoCelchuuu

I kind of disagre with much of the review. First I'll deal with your specific points then I'll talk about the overall impressions that we had of RO.

There actually are visual and audio clues. If you look on your map, you are able to see which objectives are being assaulted, and if you're in the capture zone you can see the number of people neccessary to stop the enemy from taking it, or how many you need to kill.

This actually hasn't happened to me before. I think for every time you've caught someone's toe from behind a bush, there have been 20 times that the game's cover system (where crouching keeps you behind cover) has protected someone from being shot where in another game they would have been (unrealistically) nailed.

Glowing is what HDR bloom is. High-dynamic range is designed to emulate the range of colors you get in real life but don't in games: since you can only have so much contrast in a game things don't get as bright as they ought to. HDR fixes this by making some of the pixels white, which is as bright as you can get, to simulate the brightness you get in real life when the sun hits an object.

That's true, however, you can't expect a game to perfecly emulate everything you could ever do in real life. There always have to be tradeoffs, and when you look at the way RO plays, dropping to one knee and aiming at the same time happens a lot less often than aiming from cover, as it does in real life; you're not going to be running willy-nilly in an area where there are enemies about, and you're less likely to attempt to shoot him right when you see him then you are to get to cover first. Maybe we have differring play styles, but it makes much more sense to get to cover before you try to drop an enemy than to fire at him from out in the open.

What would you suggest? Games are getting to the point where we can realistically model what a tank can and can not drive through in a multiplayer game. They are not there yet. Would you have taken out all the fences? Made them not clip into tanks?

I'm not sure that it's RO that isn't providing the teamplay many of us like. I think we aren't providing the teamplay many of us like. If someone says "everyone fall back and defend the command bunker," and that doesn't happen, is that the game's fault?

You didn't mention why it was one of your least favorite (it's one of my favorites). This map might feel like it's chokepoint city, but in reality that's just the copious amounts of cover. The map is layed out in something of a circle, and you never have to go in a certain direction. The only problem is that moving without making sure an area is secure is going to get you killed.

Heh, that's funny, myself and lots of people I have talked to say it's one of our favorites 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.

Any reason why? I mean, yeah, it is pretty ugly, but I don't think that's your reason

Do me a favor and go back to 2001 and play Operation Flashpoint. Look especially at the trees. What do they look like? Yeah, they're godawful butt ugly piss-poor excuses for trees. If those things were in Red Orchestra they'd look so bad it's not even funny. The only other games I can think of that have done forests are Far Cry and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Far Cry had an engine specifically designed for that kind of stuff, and TESIV had a multimillion dollar budget. What would you have replaced the forests with?

Yeah, that's kind of annoying. BF2's like that also but it's a bigger problem in RO.

What do you mean it never happens? Does the guy flip you off and run away? I don't think I've ever refused to give someone covering fire, or been refused. Maybe you're asking the wrong way.

Once again, I don't think RO is lacking teamplay. I think the teams are lacking teamplay.

Now for overall impressions:

Red Orchestra, I feel, is a perfect match for Tactical Gamer. Few games come close to it when it comes to the amount of teamwork required to truly defeat your opponent. America's Army, I think, is similar, and I'm sure Ghost Recon and Op:Flashpoint are although I haven't played them much, but that's pretty much it. Batlefield 2 is great for teamwork, but it's on a much larger scale. I can kill 5 people in Battlefield 2 with my M16 in about 10 seconds, and over 10 minutes I can kill 30 people, and I'll only die once or twice (to be revived by a medic). You can't do this in Red Orchestra. You're not going to take down more than a couple guys before one of their friends shoots you. If you want to succeed, not just in the overall battle but in every single firefight, you're going to have to have your teammates right there with you.

You didn't talk at all about the cover system, which is understandable if you're just talking about RO but in a review of the game is kind of annoying, since it's basically the underlying concept behind the infantry combat in this game. In Battlefield 2, cover is something you go prone behind long enough to reload, or if you're feeling lethargic you can sit there and take pot shots at people; you're much better off mobile. In Red Orchestra, cover is everything. Simply hitting the crouch button puts you completely behind most cover, and when you want to aim over it, just bring up your iron sights and you'll barely peek over. This is hugely important because infantry combat becomes something where you're either mobile and exposed or concealed and deadly. You simply can't go anywhere that the enemy is unless you either

A. Manage to kill all of them before they see you, then keep going, or

B. Have teammates.

This is as close to the Tactical Gamer ethos as you can get. Teamplay underlies every facet of RO. If you've ever played the BF2 Tactical Mod, you'll notice a lot of the changes make BF2 more like RO. Whether or not you like either of those games, you'll notice a trend: the things that Tactical Gamers look for in their games to make them more realistic, more rewarding of teamwork, more tactical, are the things you find in RO.

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NCman

Tycho mostly nailed every criticism of the review that I had, and sums up my feelings pretty well. Most of the maps Tybalt didn't like are ones that I've found to be really good. Teamplay certainly happens here and in other servers, it's just different than in BF2. Somewhat sadly to me, I've seen better teamwork and gameplay on other servers than I have on the TG servers .

It's flabbergasting to me at times during play, and in discussions in the forums, to see how many people simply don't get some of the basic game concepts, and start calling the game flawed. Capturing points is no more difficult in mechanics than capturing a flag in BF2, and I've ceratainly noticed the icon on my screen flashing to alert me to when a point is being captured, and noticed the bar telling me I'm in a cap zone and what the status of it is.

The complaint about not knowing you were in the cap zone on a map seems to be a flaw with the player, not the game. After playing awhile, I've had no problem knowing whether I was or wasn't in a cap zone, and if on Baskova we were losing the train station I made sure I got into the train station itself. It IS frustrating to be in that situation where you lost a point from players not getting in the zone. It's NOT a problem with the game, it's a problem with players not looking at the available information and understanding the game. If you're firefighting with 3 other players off on the flank somewhere while that point is going down, you really weren't helping the team as much as if you had gotten into the capture zone.

Sure, there are some graphical problems with the game, and the forest on Arad is pretty old-school. The tanks - and their shells - being stopped by fences can seem a bit whacky at times for sure, and there are some clipping issues. However, I certainly don't recall any destructible buildings in BF2. The tanks there should be able to flatten many things and should be able to plow right through walls and fences. They don't, yet nobody was complaining about it in that game. Maybe since it's a bit more difficult to drive since it's quite a bit more difficult to see, it seems like more of an issue in RO, but there again, that's getting used to the game being what it is.

RO is not BF2. This is a good thing to me, apparently not to the majority of players here.

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Bananajuice

why is teamplay an issues. I dont see it. It has voip in both team and local, it has plenty of voice commands, which you can map to any key ( i use the number pad for things like defend, attack, follow)

plus there are only a few objectives u can do at a time. either defend this position and get a few people to attack the next, if you get overrun, ask for help. map the map to an easy key so you can bring it up easliy.

You do know when an objective is taken, alittle map shows on the bottom flashing, if you see it open map.


I think we need a set night to get this game rolling. its a shame

x-fire name = bananajuice

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perry

Oh... I've wondered why that would pop up at seemingly random times!

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xTYBALTx

There seems to be some misunderstanding over precisely what I meant in regards to cues related to the final objective of a map being taken. In a game which places the utmost priority on capturing objectives, to the extent that once the final objective is captured the map immediately ends, I would expect a cue to notify me when the objective is in the process of falling.

Sure, I can call up a map to see if the objective is contested, but if I already have reason to check the map, then I don't need a cue. Something along the lines of "Get moving soldier! We're about to lose control of the Reichstag!" would be quite appropriate.

When my team is about to lose control of an objective upon which victory is decided, I want my attention grabbed and drawn towards it.

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A policy of freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy. -F.A. Hayek