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[PC] [MAC] Insurgency

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[PC] [MAC] Insurgency

Unread postby Qpo » 27 Oct 2013 08:01

http://www.playinsurgency.com/

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INSURGENCY is leading an indie revival of the tactical shooter genre. Take to the streets for intense close quarters combat, where a team's survival depends upon securing crucial strongholds. This game is highly competitive and unforgivingly lethal. It strikes a balance between one-life gameplay and prolonged action. Realistic weapons handling and equipment load-outs combined with simple heads-up-display and user interface keep players immersed in the fight.

INSURGENCY'S game modes create a distinctive experience from other first-person-shooters. Capturing objectives prolongs the entire team's opportunity to achieve victory. Matches often become an epic tug of war as both teams struggle to gain control of objective areas.

The follow-up game to the award-winning Source mod is featured on Steam's Early Access since April 2013, and now in Beta phase of development. It continues to be updated during the Beta phase, leading to a full release in 2014. Some features and content may be incomplete or not yet implemented.

BETA FEATURES
20 weapons
8 maps
4 multiplayer game modes
2 co-op game modes
Unique free-aim weapons handling
Customizable player classes
Weight-based equipment system
Team-reinforcing objectives
Simplified HUD and UI
Scripting system and SDK to support mods

At its core, INSURGENCY is about teamwork. Objectives are designed to get your team back in the game and provide additional reinforcement waves. Securing all objectives or eliminating the enemy team will result in victory. Multiplayer modes support up to 32 players, while Co-op modes support 6 players.

Firefight --- Three objectives, one for each team, plus one neutral. The only reinforcements provided are when a team secures an objective. A skilled team can win a match by eliminating their opponent in less than one minute. Level design is small to focus on quick and strategic gameplay where every life counts.

Skirmish --- Five objectives can be captured in any sequence. These are large and linear level designs that offer flanking routes for a savvy team to sneak behind the front line to secure more reinforcement at a stretch objective. The balance of momentum easily shifts between teams.

Battle --- Five objectives that must be secured in linear sequence. Each objective is worth several reinforcement to keep a prolonged fight.

Push --- Three objectives are being defended by one team and must be captured in sequence. When an objective is secured, the attackers gain more reinforcement and more time is added to the clock to secure the next. Defenders have a set amount of reinforcements and must use each life wisely to defend for the duration of the round. Fans of the original mod will enjoy this classic game mode that defined its popularity.

This commercial release was initially called "Insurgency 2", but it looks like they've decided to let it take over the original's title instead. The screenshots above are one for each of the maps currently in the game. Co-op seems to at the moment be a basic "move from the start to the checkpoint in a linear fashion with a bunch of mook bots to shoot down along the way".

I played the mod years ago, but that I liked the size and design of the maps and the minimal HUD is about all I remember. There are more screenshots and two trailers on the Steam page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/222880/
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Qpo
 
Joined: 16 May 2010 23:07
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Unread postby Qpo » 27 Oct 2013 08:12

Actually, the mod was called INSURGENCY: Modern Infantry Combat, so this game doesn't "overlap" the same title.
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Unread postby Qpo » 28 Oct 2013 06:57

There are game mode-specific versions of some of the maps, meaning that the spawn points have been moved to create a different frontline, making it play differently. At least one such version also takes place at night (for VIP) instead of the day (all other modes), further making it feel and play like a new map. This is both resource-efficient on their side and enjoyable on our side, and as we're in beta etc. they'll hopefully and probably develop this further = nice.

Movement-wise you have a slide which is triggered by sprinting and then pressing crouch while at max speed. This wasn't in the mod version but it's a good addition (at this point it looks pretty shitty though, but beta etc.) In a trailer for BF4 I also saw this, and I've been thinking for a few years such a move is needed in these type of games, to make things more "dynamic" i.e. to create more movement i.e. make the game more aggressive i.e. intense and fun. Better than a slide, however, is a roll: it's a lot more when your camera rolls with the body, it looks way cooler than a haxxy slide giving a speed burst, and it could be used more interestingly since you'll be at crouching height during it. Such a roll was already up and running beautifully in The Opera (a mod for Half-Life) over a decade ago, so today it should be a cinch to implement. Having both could be good, keeping the slide as a tool for finishing a sprint into cover, and maybe the roll being used at lower speeds, e.g. for when pinned down behind a pillar and wanting to move to the next one. You could have the length of the roll depend on what angle you were looking at the ground with or something similar, sparing you from extra buttons and giving almost "analogue" precision to it (i.e. it could be aimed like how you toss weapons in CS).

You also have leaning. Whenever I play a game with leaning it drives me nuts at first, but that might just be because I've played so much CS and love the whole "dash out around a corner with your whole body to create a cowboyish quick-draw situation". After a while it does being to feel natural, but I've never once felt badass when I've carefully leaned out a corner and popped someone. Makes me think of Serious Sam 3's tagline "NO COVER. ALL MAN."; here it's more like "ALL MOUSE. ALL THE TIME." Still, since you can't aim as accurately from the hip while moving as in CS, such a "cowboy moment" would always be in disfavor of him who dashed out around the corner, meaning the game could become terribly campy if there wasn't any leaning, so it's OK. A tip though is to set walking to toggle, so you only press ALT (default bind) once to enter "stealth mode", so you never have to hold ALT (walk), CTRL (crouch), D (strafe right) and E (lean right) at the same time as you're holding RMB and aiming down the sights. (Disclaimer: I have a ~12 year old keyboard which can't handle some combinations of buttons, so maybe this is just me.) You can also go prone, btw, since the game is military themed (which seems to be the dividing line on the matter lol: S.W.A.T. DON'T CRAWL).

Further movement-wise — and now we're getting to the good stuff — is what I've missed in many games and was now happily reminded of where it was from: "Unique free-aim weapons handling". This is amazing. I was about to keep it at "great" — but fuck it: it's amazing. I'll try to explain what it is: The sens of your arms is higher than that of your torso, both of which are controlled with the mouse; it's kind of like how in an RTS your screen moves if you drag the cursor against the edge of the screen, but your screen starts moving as soon as your hands do. The effect of it is that you actually get to AIM from your hip, instead of all shots landing at the exact center on your screen. For that accuracy you aim "properly" by holding down RMB and looking down the sights, as normal, but the aiming from the hip is REALLY good for when you're in tight spaces and clear out rooms, as you can walk in and look to the left and point your weapon at the left of your screen, and then do the same to the right, all the while having pretty good vision forward. And it's like your sens is low when aiming (you can adjust the ratio), normal for turning your body, and high for shooting from the hip. It's just smooth and pleasurable as fuck. Maybe I'm gushing, but now that I've refreshed my memory of how cool this is, every game without it will feel painfully stiff. But I'm primarily a "hip shooter", and hate it when the ONLY way to get ANY accuracy is to ALWAYS aim down the sights, so maybe this isn't as big a deal to other people. Still, HAVING to use the sights even UP CLOSE is fucking stupid, anyone should see that, and in this game you don't. You also feel like a fucking terminator when you're walking forward and a guy pop ups on the right and you burst him from the hip without really moving your screen, and then a guy pops up on the left and you do the same. Good shit.

You don't have money, but rather "supply", which you can't lose, and spend on equipment which stays with you round after round. So you can't fall back to shitty weapons, and if you on the third round want to change things up, you can e.g. pick a cheaper weapon and instead add more armor. You also have a good selection right of the bat. I'm not sure what increases your supply, but you get more as the game progress, and there are attachments, better ammo, types of armor, extra ammo, grenades, etc. The menu could look better and take fewer clicks, but we're still in beta etc. It'll be interesting to see what weapons and equipment they add as we go along; currently there is very little in terms of weapons that fulfill the exact same role, which I view as a good thing. I'm tempted to squeeze in a "I don't like purely aesthetic choices dressed up as mechanically meaningful", but maybe others like to pick their "favorite weapon" just because it looks different. Then again my favorites are both in the game already (guess which ones lol). Anyway, the less equipment you carry the faster you move around. I once tried going with a SMG and no armor, and sure enough I was fast as fuck, but I also died in like one bullet, so I'm sticking with full-auto rifles and heavy armor for now. In a clan game however it could be extremely valuable to have someone scout ahead, pushing the frontline further towards the enemy.

Some guy kept asking if I knew what the difference between the "normal" and "realism" setting for how damage works. I've no idea, but you die really fast, which is nice. There are settings which make a big difference though, e.g. if the server spams
"Qpo (AK) Victim #15"
"Qpo (AK) Victim #16"
"Qpo (AK) Victim #17"
"Qpo (AK) Victim #18"
constantly or not. It's better when it doesn't as things become about a THOUSAND times more intense, as you actually have to confirm your kills and can't just glance at your HUD to know if you can relax for a few seconds or will be running into a hail of bullets if you go around that corner. It is also VERY nice how it reduces the effectiveness of spamming mindlessly, whether it is grenades or shooting through walls, since all types of brainless play suck ass — this shit's supposed to be tactical yo.

I don't know what engine they're using, but one server was playing maps from the old game (i.e. the mod), which automatically downloaded as custom maps, showing their extension as .bsp, i.e. as in the Half-Life and Source engines. I don't care about the format, but these old maps didn't have an overview-screen, which made them play very differently from the new maps where you do have such a screen, showing the map's layout, where objectives are, and where your teammates are. Things instantly become many times more intense when it is gone: I can't check on the overview if a sound came from a friendly or is hostile, I can't tell where enemies are from where the markers of friendly units fade out, and I don't always have a perfect overview of what areas my team controls and not. The old maps I played were all on the Battle mode though, which is quite linear, much unlike the new maps I played, so the comparison is flawed since too many variables changed. Still, I did enjoy having a overview on the larger maps, where it allowed me to play tactically with my team even on public even when no voice is used, rather than it degrading into a deathmatch type deal. But it's also possible that removing it would be a big improvement.

All you have in the HUD is what mode your weapon is at (semi, full auto, etc.), how many extra magazines you have, and when you switch weapon there's some HUD for that too. There's also mode-specific elements for which objectives you control and not. But there's NO minimap. This is incredibly liberating: there's nothing on my screen pulling my eyes away from looking directly into the gameworld. And as bringing up the overview blocks your sight, covering most of the screen while being 100% opaque, this means you're vulnerable when using it, meaning you'll actually take cover or even hide so that you can look at it in relative peace and assess the situation, meaning you won't be using it overly much.

I found the sound to be — not inaccurate, but you didn't hear very well very far. I did start hearing better after playing a while, so it's probably just me still being used to the super-haxxy way sound works in CS, where you can hear cleanly through most walls as if they weren't even there. When it comes to the in-game voice, it seems to work only between teammates close to each other, but I'm not completely sure. Volume seemed to scale with distance, but there was no direction to it yet. To have it realistically short-distanced is cool, but almost pointless if one can see everyone's position one the overview anyway, so here they should make up their mind. There's a bunch of ambient sound too, which is good, like cars driving by outside of the warzone on the urban maps, whereas on the artic map there is much less noise, making the echo of snipers really effectful.

My second most favorite thing with this game after the ~free-aim weapons handling~ is that while there are what I call "floaty names", they are not floaty, but instead inside the chests. It might not look cool on screenshots, but when you play you won't be in a constant struggle between looking AT the models instead of above them. They also only show up on friendlies, and only when you're close enough to, if it was irl, tell who it is by their face. This looks very beta-ish though, so it might change even though it works really well at the moment. You also see these names through walls, possibly as a "lingering effect" when you've first seen the player's model properly. Markers for objectives hover around floatily though, visible across the whole map through all walls, which it'd be nice to get rid of as long as the overview is in. (If they removed the overview I'd have to think about it.)

When I played this a couple of hours yesterday all servers I was on actually crashed constantly, apparently due to a recently released hotfix. It was annoying, but not enough for me to stop playing. Much more annoying then is that the colors of the teams switch so that the one you're on is always shown as blue: I mean for fuck's sake just set Security as blue and Terrorists as red already!!!

As for how it looks... I'll let someone else comment on that lol, since what's going through my mind is more or less only focused around view-distance and what my FPS might be etc. The smoke grenades are nice and thick though. Also, the FOV is locked to 90, which is really nice. Not that it's locked to specifically 90 when I'm playing 16:9 (no idea what fits best actually), but that it IS locked, so that you stealth-wise know what you have to work with, and that there are no incentives to play with a horrible FOV to help counter being flanked, etc. Oh, and scopes are 3D, i.e. you hold up the weapon in front of you and actually aim through a scope which zooms in, but cool as this is you can also look next to the scope on your screen, which is weird; it'd be better if they simply put up a black foreground, having you see only what's visible through the scope.

...

If the server has a small map-rotation it gets repetitive, and once you learn where on a map the frontline is you can relax whenever you're not on it. At some point my K:D was 32-3, which is fun in the spur of the moment, but also makes me want to stop playing, but then I ended up on some server where the enemies were more organized and I'd never meet them fewer than three at a time, often dying quickly, which was really cool. But yeah, for pewpewing for a couple of hours this is my favorite game at the moment — but there's a lot of games I haven't checked out yet, so take that as you wish.

These guys know what they're doing though. I don't know if the ~free-aim weapons handling~ is unique or not, but it is fucking great, and on the whole I'd say they're pretty successful with their "sustained action with a one-life feeling focused on team objectives", which is exactly what multiplayer tactical FPSing should be like.
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Unread postby Qpo » 28 Oct 2013 08:13

Ah, I remember now that spawn-slaughtering was a problem in the mod. There they tried to bake the spawns naturally in as a part of the map, having like a fortified little shack somewhere you'd spawn in, but someone would always set up a machinegun and just spray the living shit out of the place. If it had multiple exits to get around that, a team could still camp all of them if they had good enough control over the map.

In this version however, there's a buffer zone around each spawn in which the "home team" can shoot as normal, but the "away team" can't. If you walk too close to the enemy spawn you get a massage saying "WARNING: RESTRICTED AREA" letting you know you're in their buffer zone. Unnatural as fuck lol, but a very effective mechanic and a big improvement over how it worked in the previous game. And all of that only goes for standing in it, i.e. you can still be outside of it and fire into it.
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