Musings on ... Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45

Red Orchestra is another oddity. Originally a mod for Unreal Tournament 2004 which won the Make Something Unreal competition, the team then formed the studio, Tripwire, and developed this. And it’s pretty great to be honest. It’s set on the Eastern front during World War II, and as such presents a much more brutal war. Think of it as a realistic Call of Duty. But awesome.

The game revolves around simple attack-and-defence mechanics, with one team attempting to capture points in a certain order whilst the other team stops them. Many of the maps are hugely expansive, with up to 25 players a side fighting it out. Others are smaller, tenser affairs, where every corner ends in a sharp and unexpected death.

There are also huge tank battles with fully simulated tank warfare, often requiring a decent amount of teamwork between the tank crews. Of course, it’s no walk in the park. The whole game takes place in first-person, so there’s no looking around your tank as you drive along. If you’re the driver, you’re navigating through the tiny slot in the front of the tank, or you can open the hatch, exposing yourself to enemy fire but allowing greater awareness. One well-placed shell can knock you out in one hit, so tank battles are often cat-and-mouse affairs, with neither side wanting to go for the do-or-die charge.

However, I think that the infantry battles, or at least the combined-forces battles, are the most interesting. Seeing as you almost always die from a shot to the chest, drop your gun if you get shot in the hand, and lose a lot of speed if you get shot in the leg, you’re constantly on edge, making sure the enemy can’t get the drop on you. It’s incredibly atmospheric, further aided by the brilliant effects when bullets travel near you. A loud crack accompanies a fuzziness of vision, and a loss of accuracy. In this game, sustained machine gun fire can suppress a whole bunch of guys, and so is finally a decent tactic to use in a first-person shooter.

But if you do that, then you’re always a target for that lone sniper, peeking around the window frame of a far of building, and lining you up in his sights. The weapons in Red Orchestra are incredibly satisfying, and that’s probably one of the better reasons to play it. The bolt-action rifles, the mainstay of both the German and Russian armies, are brilliant to use, and seem to have just the right amount of heft in a shot to make it feel realistic. What’s also brilliant is the extent to which they go to keep you in the game. You have to click after a shot to re-cock the bolt. Sniper scopes don’t obscure your whole screen; they only magnify part of it. Machine-guns have to be set up before you can fire them. All of this adds to the impression that this might actually have been what war was like Or at least, as close as most of us will get to experiencing that kind of warfare.