Reviews Insurgency: Sandstorm Review

Iv been loving this game. Its come a long way too.
i get the frustration you can have with it but its a brutal game that doesn't hold your hand in anyway.

Getting to know the maps and a feel for the guns is key.

 

Big fan of the preceding game, so I bought this a couple of weeks before the scheduled go-live in Sept. Within days, the go-live was pushed back to Dec - clearly they have struggled to get the game finished. Even now facial hair textures are comical.And unlike the previous game, there are too many similar weapons for my liking though I imagine these will change over time. It still feels like the game is in Beta, albeit an advanced Beta.

On the plus side, there is a fairly well-balanced Fire Support/CAS feature on both sides - not usually a fan, but it doesn't seem overly OP. Graphics are obviously better, but I think will get better still in future updates. Sounds are great though. And a big change from the previous game, the AI are much more sophisticated. Excellent use of grenades, flanking, attacking en masse & retreating if taking a beating. I mainly play coop so this is significant for me.

Overally, if you enjoyed Insurgency mode or Insurgency 2, you will enjoy this as much if not more.

 

I'm pretty much addicted to it right now, (45+h of playtime), so far the biggest problem is playerbase - especially the ones who don't know/care how to utilize commander/observer or "frag hunters" who refuse to get onto objective (countless times there was a situation where 5+ players are camping around it and one guy from enemy team sneaks in and caps it, like, wtf are you even doing), also invisible no-go zones are pretty annoying.
So far the only game-breaking bug I encountered is spawning in the wall and being unable to kill yourself, but had it happen only once to me and saw maybe 3 other cases.
Performance wise its a bit mixed bag, but i found that setting texture streaming to low (GTX970) helps solve most of the micro stuttering problems.

Regarding paragraph about respawn time - it feels like the reviewer only played firefight mode? Because respawn times in push/skirmish modes is less than a minute in most cases.