Staff – October 23, 2018 at 10:08 AM
You know there’s someone on the other side of the door. Moments ago, your teammate announced that they’d made contact there, and a muffled sputter of gunfire followed — now, silence. You enter the room. Aside from the bloodied corpse of your teammate, the room seems clear. You venture nervously towards the center of the room, and then: Two shots ring out and you die. Your opponent was hiding and listening like you were. Now, you must wait, fingers crossed for your team to capture the next objective so that you can respawn.
Tense, organic gameplay moments such as these are Insurgency: Sandstorm’s specialty. It combines elements of simulation and realism — a barebones HUD with no crosshair, a complex ballistics system, weapons and people that behave like they would in actual modern warfare — with objective-based gameplay to deliver a tactical FPS experience that’s sure to keep your heart racing.
Insurgency started as a total conversion mod of Valve’s Half-Life 2 before it launched as a standalone game — also named Insurgency — in 2014. Sandstorm picks up where 2014’s Insurgency left off, presenting players with a much more robust environment, brand-new character customization system, and a host of new features like in-game vehicles, while maintaining the cinematic feel and grit for which its predecessor was known.
The Insurgency series sits comfortably between hardcore, ultra-realistic FPS games like Arma or Squad and more overtly gamified experiences like Call of Duty or Battlefield. Returning players will find that Sandstorm preserves the core gameplay and mechanics of the last Insurgency. “Overall, we're going for something that is realistic and immersive but still fun as a game,” Lead Game Designer Michael Tsarouhas explained.
Building an accurate and immersive experience was contingent on a deep and intimate understanding of the battlegrounds from which the game’s fictional warzone draws inspiration, including the war-torn regions of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. Tsarouhas explained that the team did extensive research and conducted a lot of interviews with a variety of people with different perspectives, who ranged from Western military personnel to members of indigenous militaries or local militias, to get things right — a perspective that is often rarely represented in military FPS games with such care.
The scope of their research is impressive, particularly for an independent studio of their size. As a result, everything in the game feels authentic. “Pretty much everything in the game, whether it's a weapon or a character...has some precedent in a current conflict,” Tsarouhas said.
Mechanics that reflect the game’s commitment to realism include its aforementioned minimal HUD (omitting even things like a kill feed or a clearly displayed ammo count) and the ease of death (one or two shots are sufficient to kill a player). On the other hand, Insurgency uses a class and loadout system and is structured around a variety of different game modes that each center around a different objective, some even allowing players limited options to respawn. “We like to say we're in the middle of the spectrum between action and simulation,” Tsarouhas said.
New World Interactive remained true to their design philosophy throughout their development of Sandstorm, taking everything that the first Insurgency did well to another level. The most significant improvement to the game is an upgrade to Unreal Engine 4 from Valve’s Source engine. Players who are familiar with 2014’s Insurgency will notice a palpable shift in the graphics towards the better and more lifelike, such as breakable and mutable doors, a more fully-fledged cast of voice actors, and a more comprehensive audio system.
This last one in particular has an enormous effect on both the immersiveness of the environment and on the way a player might strategize during a match. Limiting a player’s information to only what they can hear makes them much more dependent on their perception and ability to traverse a map without being noticed easily or caught vulnerable.
It’s this commitment to detail that makes Insurgency: Sandstorm stand out in its genre. Tsarouhas stated that he, too, has had moments playing it himself where the immersiveness of the game surprised him. One such moment happened even in early internal testing, when the game was a skeleton of what it is in its current stage.
“I fired a gun indoors and I heard this ‘Thoom,’ this thunderous sound that sounded completely different from a few seconds ago when I was firing outside,” he said. “I literally, in real life, gasped. It made me feel like I was watching a video, a LiveLeak of soldiers breaching and clearing a room and yelling at each other and shooting. It was a really cool moment where I realized, ‘Wow, this engine's really powerful."
Insurgency: Sandstorm will be released on December 12, 2018.
