Red Orchestra

[mwerner]

Like military shooters? Like realism? Try the latest iteration of Red Orchestra, released through Valve/Steam. Actually titled Red Orchestra-Ostfront, it's a stand-alone game (you don't nead Unreal Tournament as you did with the original mod) available for about 25 bucks.

I've got about 5 hours playtime now, and it's very good. Uncompromising along the lines of WWII online, with iron sights, realistic damage, weapon loadouts, ballistics, etc. Not the depth of some contemporary military shooters, no planes, boats, or submarines. Just infantry, armored cars, and tanks. The tanks are very well done indeed, with seperate positions for driver, commander, gunner, etc.

Maps are generously sized, and if the graphics are not state-of-the art, they are good enough so that you don't think about them, and the game runs smoothly.
The only glitch so far affecting most players is a conflict with Zone Alarm which causes crashes. They are working on this one; I just uninstalled ZA and used the Windows firewall till they get a fix.
Plenty of low-ping servers too.

 

[rebeltf]

Yea , I've been eyeballing that since it popped up on Steam , me thinks I'll have to give it a spin after your review I just watched the video "preview" of it and that was pretty neat , very well done.
While on the subject of Steam (hope I'm not hijacking your thread by this) , I just scored a HL2 mod (single player) called The Island http://stalk3r.wz.cz/eng/main.htm I'm only about 30 minutes into it and it's pretty intense.

 

[mwerner]

I played through that one a couple of weeks ago, it was pretty good. There are a bunch of decent single-player mods out, and even more multi-player jobs.

I reccomend:

Dayhard...Very funny, very inventive, and pretty hard too! Follows the adventures of Gordan Freeman's brother, Morgan....

Mistake of Pythagorus. Japanese developer. Visually striking, with many created objects and physical effects. Difficult in spots, but there is a forum if you get stuck. Basically an "alternate world" mod.

Minerva. An episodic (there are two available) series featuring pretty straightforward HL2 play, with very good maps and lots of Combine baddies to shoot. The gimmick is constant input from your "control", who is frequently rather nasty.

S-Mod. Another Japanese effort, this one doesn't change the game much, but gives you lots more enemies which appear randomly, and lots more clever weapons. You get a cool sniper rifle, an M3 grease gun, a Combine rifle modified to shoot very destructive laser beams, a PSP that shoots game discs, a magic wand (no kidding!) and exploding bananas. Great fun, breezing through the game with enormous destructive powers.