I was a fan of the RO mod yet never got around to Ostfront, believing RO2 to be where I should start on the retail version of this mod seems to have left me very much wanting. This game is a realistic "one shot one kill" attempt at The Stalingrad-Kessel as German and Russian forces collide, using small maps to imitate intense battles.
If you haven't already, look at gameplay and reviews on places such as Youtube before purchasing, I felt watching it was one thing, playing is another, it was like driving a car with the gear arrangement upside down in comparison to other shooters.
I thought RO2 would be a nice bolt action rifle experience with sprawling maps and teamwork, but so far it has diluted itself to being not as large fast and fun as Battlefield: Bad company 2's hardcore mode, yet not as realistic as some Arma 2 mods per se. I don't believe that reviewing the game to recommend it will will suffice so instead I hope my experiences help share out my inadequacies with it.
The Single player is forgettable (Hah), even for learning how to play the game it was more frustrating than fun, and learning elements such as Artillery and squad commanding were poorly implemented at best. So I tried my best to get as much game out of this as possible in the online infantry combat!
Voice acting is dreadful let's get that out the way, characters will give away their position just to say something utterly grinding on the ears in English (Yet appears foreign on the opposing teams ears, thankfully there are settings to reduce the frequency of this in the settings yet no option like in Battlefield to keep it foreign on your side, tovarisch), character movement is sluggish, jerky and fails to provide a sense of realism of motion but instead implies a sense of limitation; leading to frustration and so produces death, for example the inability to jump a wall, the inability to turn around then sprint the other direction, the inability to quickly peak around the corner, etc, makes moving and aiming a rifle a chore. - Instead you will try to lean left, lag a couple of times, then due to your tightened FOV be shot in the stomach, intuitive!
The majority of the times I have played online boil down to Submachine guns being incredibly overpowered leaving the player frustrated at the lack of options available when holding a bolt action rifle or similar, sure this is part of the war and seems attractive but I'll get to why that doesn't work later, the lack of good Anti Aliasing and FOV within the game leads to targets being near impossible to spot, lighting dyeing friendly uniforms a different colour thus leading to friendly fire. And I haven't even managed to play online in a tank yet, maybe they just aren't popular enough. Yet within the single player the design of the tanks was incredible (Although I see a lack of the vehicles we had in the Mod such as the SdKfz 251, and a lack of uniforms compared to the mod) although the levels they were implemented on were not so incredible. I also failed to mention the friendly AI in singleplayer are pretty useless, and don't kid yourselves, even at max settings this game doesn't really look THAT great, the landscape and geometry appears just as unreadable on medium end machines as they do on high ones.
So why does RO2 feel like a giant SMG field test? Because all weapons other than automatics appear inferior, maps channel players into one little gap encouraging stormtroop tactics and aggressive forms of weaponry such as an SMG, entire building blocks are inaccessible, entire areas are just flat ground with no flanking routes which are of course monitored by bolt action rifles and light machine guns and so overall the game ends up like a fast paced corridor shooter rather than a slow treacherous team advance like it apparently should be, there's also not really much incentive to help teammates in the first place, other than to lay down smoke, camp for your own good or apparently theirs. To capture an objective is standard procedure, just the battle getting to that point, just bloody sucks.
- I Installed this game onto an SSD, which means at the beginning of every round I generally connect first, meaning I get to choose the best limited classes simply because I can.
Might I add that the majority of "vanilla" equipment or standard equipment is available to you at the beginning (This does not include bayonets, sadly, so yeah, who cares about your fun or fairness), so instead an unlock system is present. Because, what benefits teamwork more than unlocks right? To let these players dabble on in their own little world of unlocks and KDR? (Thankfully it does not show deaths in the score menu, and in this game you will DIE alot).
It's nice that game like this exists but it's a shame that it just wasn't that enjoyable, it hit too much of an uncanny valley with me (In departments such as, visuals, sound, level design and player movement...and combat...and histo- infact forget about it), and I've played them all, Counter strike, BFBC2, Quake 3 ta, name it and I've probably been there, but RO2 didn't stand up well at all as a game I could sit down and play and have fun with, without my mate digging at me saying "I told you it would suck."
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