This game was provided to review.

The original Insurgency standalone game on the source engine was released in January of 2014 and four years later New World Interactive released the sequel. The sequel is running on the Unreal 4 Engine this time around. It continues what the original Insurgency started with a limited HUD and a more towards a realistic bullet and damage system. You fight as either a security force or an insurgent across a varying number of game modes. Does it do enough right to be worth your time and money?

Gameplay and Visuals

The gameplay and the sound are the high points of Insurgency Sandstorm. With the focus on realistic weapon behavior and damage it sets itself apart from other games with higher time to kill. It forces you to take your time and clear buildings, roads and other natural environmental coke points in a slow and methodical way. On the same token when you pull the trigger on the gun and you have the shot lined up you can rest assure that if you hit them they will go down. Bullets in this game are very deadly and this adds to the suspense and reinforces the idea that you have to move thoughtfully and pay attention as you move through the map. Speaking of maps this is one of the things I find disappointing is the game has only five maps. This includes the first big update to the game as well and I really wish there were just more of them. There are a couple of them that I enjoy and I feel flow well for Push and a few just don’t feel as great. They do all however look stunning while you get shot at from a guy you can’t see peaking from around the corner down the street. The visual in this game are fantastic and the amount of detail in each weapon is awesome to see.

So I touched on game modes and there are seven total game modes now included in the game as team deathmatch got added recently. There are four versus game modes and these are player vs other players in teams fighting it out in the streets capturing and defending points. If you die you have to wait for a respond timer before you can respond assuming your team has any reinforcement points left. Once your team runs out of reinforcements you’re surviving team members must secure a point to give the team the ability to respond. If your surviving team members die then the round is over and your team loses. That formula runs though all versus modes. The remaining modes either pits you against AI in a squad co-op mode or team death match that just puts two teams on a map with unlimited respawns and access to all weapons and first team to reach the kill limit wins.

Team deathmatch gameplayWeapons are quite important in a shooter and this is yet another aspect of this game that shines. You have access to specific weapons depending on the side that you’re playing and class you choose. You then have a load out point limit to pick secondary weapons, grenade types, armor and of course putting attachments on your weapon. These attachments have both positive and negative so it’s important to pick attachments that benefit your play style and class. Hands down this is one the best weapon customization in recent memory.

Sound

Sound design in this game is surprisingly good. Having a rocket launcher go flying past your head as you come around the corner feels and sounds quite superb. I wanted to touch on sound in this game because it can make or break a first person shooter and this one is pretty much spot on. It’s a vast improvement over the previous titles.

Performance

This is where we get to my first negative with my experience with Sandstorm and that is the extremely inconsistent performance results. I have a semi decent computer to run this game on and I experience framerate inconstancy quite a lot depending on where I am on maps and it’s frustrating to say the least. Also I’m no expert but I feel like mouse sensitivity is tied to v-synch as when turning v-synch on I notice it’s slower to rotate but when you just limit the frame rate it feels more fluid. I’m unsure if this is an Unreal Engine thing or something normally happens but this is just my first time noticing it but felt it was worth noting here on top of the framerate dipping and diving throughout the game. I hope that as the game progress we see more optimization to the maps and improvements to performance as the game can look downright beautiful with all the settings maxed out.

Community

This unfortunately is a huge sticking point for me and one of the reasons this review was so long in the making. To start with to say this community is toxic is an understatement as multiple times I was met with the N-word, racial slurs and many other kinds of just disrespectful vulgar language above your normal frustrations at getting killed or loosing. It was disheartening to try and play because any time someone pressed the push to talk there was real chance you were going to get a ear full of inappropriate and disrespectful VOIP communication. You might be thinking to yourself there must be some sort of mute option and there is but during my playtime it did not work if you were dead. This meant that while you were alive and both teams were muted with the “mute all” option to get some peace and quiet the mute function seemed to work. Once you became a spectator however it would break the mute feature and you would be once again subject to the people on their microphones. This happened multiple times during my experience with the game and left quite a bad taste in my mouth in terms of enjoyment and my confidence in recommending the game to others. I hope that this improves moving forward but if the previous titles are anything to go by I’m not holding my breath. I want to think that at least the tools in the game to remove you from these situations work as intended in the near future.

Conclusions

This game has the potential to really get me hooked. The team play and weapon and damage behavior in game are something I’m always looking for in a shooter. This game s is superbly crafted and shows how versatile the Unreal 4 engine can be used. I really want to enjoy this title and one way to do that is to play with friends but it’s just so difficult to recommend when you have to add “oh yea the community just spews toxic crap in chat but the game play is good” and for many people these days we don’t want to deal with that type of thing when we sit down to enjoy a video game. At time of writing I would wait for a sale and hope to get a couple of friends you can team up with because the gameplay is extremely fun and rewarding if you can avoid interacting with others in game.