The slant toward realism is engaging and helps it stand out from other shooters. I like that it can take just a single bullet or two to down or be downed and the methodical approach to movement that decision inspires. I also really enjoy many of the smaller realism details, like the fact that reloading means actually removing the current magazine and putting in a new one instead of the leftover bullets magically transferring to the next magazine like pretty much every other game does.

On the other hand, it gets old extremely quickly and there isn't enough variety to keep things fresh for very long. The objectives are all a bit boring and there aren't too many of them to begin with. Also, perhaps I am misunderstanding something, but the way matches are scored seems heavily, heavily, heavily in favor of the defending team. I appreciate that there is a local-play mode, which functions as a single-player option as well against bots, but the AI teammates are so incompetent that you are basically left lone-wolfing it from the get-go. The game overall could use a layer of polish and general refinement. And one last quibble that is on the minor side, for a game with such heavy friendly fire, the friendly hud indicators are far too unreliable. The friendly indicators have a habit of drifting way off of the character models to the point of no longer serving their purpose. This results in unintentional friendly fire that should have been avoided as well as a hesitancy to fire at enemies on occasion because you need to double-check that they aren't actually friendlies missing their label.

I don't know if this game really nails the balance between arcade and tactical.

Rising Storm is probably my favourite online shooter series, and while it also has serious problems, i consider it to do a few things better than I:S

The shooting in this game is great however. Guns feel punchy and responsive. The loadout system is fun and in depth and the modes (mostly) feel appropriate for the mechanics. I think this game suffers the most from it's tight maps and small scale, it almost feels like a tactical CS instead of a sim shooter

Regardless, very fun. I've put a lot of enjoyable hours into the game, and don't regret a minute of it

Been playing this with MrPPeeps: https://www.backloggd.com/u/MrPPeeps/

I’m having an absolute blast playing this with him. I love all the different classes and how you can experiment with different attachments to create the best weapon. It’s not too cumbersome and unrealistic like shitty WarZone.

To me it feels like a more grounded R6 Siege. While this is an online multiplayer game and I can’t really critic it I will say that once you’ve got the learning curve down, the game is an absolute blast. I’ve had a few glitches but other than that it’s perfect.

4.5/5

My go to realism shooter, I love this game alot. The gunplay is perfect, shots are satisfying and the weapons handle so well. There are plenty of maps and modes to play as well as AI that can get really difficult to ensure the game never dies long term. I say that because the player numbers are falling and I can understand why, there is hardly any progression you can pretty much build any weapon you like from the start. The games performance is still not optimised it sucks to see since the first game ran on source and was PERFECT. But when you finally get into a lobby and the sound and level design take over and immerse you it is awesome, really fun to play with friends and the gameplay allows for many creative opportunities.