In other words, you’re slow, awkward, fragile and hopelessly ill-equipped for war. Instead, you feel about as useful on a battlefield as you would be in real life.

You never feel like a trained (but human) soldier. While many may see Red Orchestra’s commitment to realistic character movement to be welcome, this isn’t like Rainbow Six or even ArmA. This is the very opposite of modern FPS games like Modern Warfare or Battlefield where you’re movement is slick and responsive. From the first moment the game feels buggy and rough and you consistently feel like your running through treacle. In fact, it never really feels like a satisfying game to play at any point throughout the single player campaign. It certainly doesn’t feel like if for the first few hours that you play. This is a game that feels so realistic – so much like a simulation – that its like no other FPS game you’ve played. With Red Orchestra 2, Tripwire Interactive have taken the sludgy controls of more “realistic” shooters like Killzone and went even further. Thus, Guerilla games admitted that they had misjudged their audience and their game was more “broken” than “original”. In fact, so many gamers complained that the gameplay felt too heavy that the developers made it more responsive and twitchy in a patch two months after its initial release. Killzone 2 was renowned for its heavy, cumbersome feel and its momentum based movement was an acquired taste. There’s a fine line between an FPS game which feels “original” and one which feels “broken”, and Red Orchestra 2 blurs the line.

Red orchestra 2 beta