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User Rating: 7.5 | Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45 PC
SHORT VERSION:
Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45 compared to Day of Defeat: Source :
- Slower gameplay
- Graphics seem less polished
+ 14 vehicles to operate: 12 tanks, Soviet armored car, German half-track
- Good luck telling the tanks apart on the battlefield (although most German Panzerkampfwagens are painted differently)
+ Iron sights
+ Bayonets and gun melee attacks
- They're pretty slow and look bad
+ Big maps
- 90-120 second wait time between maps and no progress bar
+ 13 different maps, 7 have vehicles
- Big maps mean ALOT of walking (slowly) for people without vehicles
+ 28 weapons to choose from
- Recoil and aiming can take alot of getting used to
- Gameplay takes alot of getting used to
- No crosshair can confuse new players
- New players who don't look at their orders can be very confused
- Is that guy on my team?
- Grenades don't go far and stick to the ground
- Walking, running, throwing animations could be better
+ Longer sprint time
+ Frightening airstrikes, great sound
+ Blow up a tank on foot with a Panzerfaust
+ Specific body part damage
+ Semi-automatic sniper rifles on some maps
- Looks worse at 800x600 compared to DoD:S
- No breakable windows, doors, etc (uses Unreal 2.5 engine, not Source)
- Rifleman have to press fire AGAIN to reload
- FF seems to always be on, so teamkilling could still be a big problem
+ Most servers have a FFKillLimit that autokicks TKers
+ Some players may like the slower pace

LONG VERSION:
This review refers to the Steam-downloaded version of the game.

Most of my opinions of this game are due to playing Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, Day of Defeat, and Day of Defeat: Source before it.

Initially I was interested in this game for the following reasons: it was supposedly a more realistic wargame, had 14 vehicles to operate, no crosshairs, and I was impressed by the trailer. I thought it would be like Day of Defeat: Source with vehicles, but it's not. If TripWire wanted to show that "War is Hell" I think they've accomplished it. If War is Hell, how is a game that realistically portrays it supposed to be fun?

I bought and pre-loaded the game via Steam before March 14th so the GCF cache files were already on my computer. Once it was released on March 14th, I tried to play and it wouldn't load. So I went to Steampowered.com and the #1 new help topic was "Red Orchestra won't load." Apparently Steam needed to validate the files *again* in order to play. After the pre-loaded files were validated I had to wait another 20 minutes for more updates.

The game crashed 2 or 3 times the first time I tried running it, perhaps because of ZoneAlarm. I have a P4 3.2C CPU, ASUS P4C800E motherboard, 1GB PC3200 RAM, and an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128MB videocard.

The main menu is clunky compared to DoD:S. After I remapped the controls to my liking (and there are ALOT of them) I went to play on the Internet. First time I went to play (around 4 hours after it was released) there were over 230 servers but the filter system is lousy. I selected a server and the "Deploy" screen that comes up before a map loads TAKES FOREVER. Or at least it seems that way because there is no visible Progress Bar. A new map typically takes 90-120 seconds to load, probably because some of them are fairly big. The picture during this screen also has no relation to the content of the map. Get used to seeing these pictures ALOT as you wait for maps to change. Better bring a book to read. I'm halfway through War and Peace right now.

There is some interesting info on the character select screen. You can select from several classes depending on the map. The weapon select portion is very unintuitive -- I didn't realize I could choose a different weapon until a while after playing. As of March 15th, 2006 at 7PM Mountain Time, I saw 380 servers with 1,496 players playing Red Orchestra; 42 servers had at least 20 people playing on them. As of March 20th, 2006 at 6PM Mountain Time, I saw 443 servers with 1,167 players; 28 servers had at least 20 people playing on them.

After playing Day of Defeat: Source, the game is definitely jarring at first. Early on I noticed how sluggish your character is. It feels like you're wading through molasses. Different guns and ammo have different weights and affect how fast you can move. I'm guessing TripWire designed it that way to cut down on lag on huge maps, but lag still occurs. It seems like you can sprint for a longer time than in DoD:S, which is nice. But it seems more like trotting than running. The walking, running, and throwing animations could be ALOT better. A white border grows up around your player icon in the lower left, showing how tired he is. If you fall from a great height, the legs on the player icon will go red, indicating an injury and your speed will be affected. Different body parts on your player icon will also turn red if injured.

There is no HUD like in DoD:S in the top right, but you can put a compass on screen. You can look in your orders to see which places need to be captured and your position is shown as a red arrow. I find it annoying that you have to press the fire button AGAIN to reload rifles. You can visually see how many ammo clips you have left but it's easy to run out of a clip without warning. It's nice that you can aim down the iron sights on most weapons, but sometimes it's hard to tell what you're firing at. It's lame when you throw grenades because they don't go very far and just stick to the ground. Having no visible crosshair is fine, if your character would shoot straight. There should *at least* be a button to make your guy hold his gun straight in front of him. New player may find themselves running diagonally due to how your guy holds his rifle.

When you're moving near the edges of a map you'll get a onscreen warning saying you've entered a minefield and you'll die if you keep going. Picking up things is a chore because you have to be next to them just right. Each team has a limit on Reinforcements so if you die often, soon your team won't be able to respawn. The scoped sniper rifles are great, especially the semi-auto ones, but I think it's only available on some maps.

If you have UT2K4, I would recommend playing the Unreal Tournament Red Orchestra mod before playing this. I think it's impressive that this game began as a mod, and you can tell alot of work was put into it. I do like that you can mount a bayonet on your rifle (like in DoD but left out of DoD:S). You can also hit people with the butt of your gun. But you can't punch, kick, or wrestle someone to the floor and stab them. If your gun gets shot out of your hand you're pretty much out of luck because your character doesn't know how to punch.

Some maps have tanks, some don't. To operate a tank you have to be tank class, so other classes can't just get in and get a ride. Initially, I thought the tank maps were the best part of the game, but after a while some maps become pretty easy for one side to win, like Arad and Ogledow. Operating the tanks is difficult at first, especially over uneven ground. Tanks can hold 2 or 3 team members, each in different positions, but you can operate them with only one person. One drives (behind a tiny porthole or out a hatch in the open), one operates the main cannon. Some tanks have machine gun positions. Scroll through Next Weapon/Previous weapon to see all the tank positions. Operating a tank with other team members is fun at first and you can configure the keyboard to give better vehicle commands. Without good communication, a tank crew can die pretty quickly. Different tanks have different reload times due to ammo size and you can hear your guy breathing hard as he reloads the cannon.

Russian BA-64 armored cars hold a driver and a machinegunner and any Soviet can operate them, but they are very easy to turn over so you have to be more careful driving them. German half-tracks have a driver, a machinegunner, and several Werhmacht can sit on the benches inside. You can't steal enemy vehicles, which is sad. One of my favorite things in the game is blowing up enemy tanks on foot with a Panzer. You can also walk right up to an enemy tank and try and shoot the driver through the porthole before it runs you over. Certain classes can place satchel charges on tanks and blow them up. Some people may not like that enemies can exit a tank immediately to avoid exploding. Get ready for ALOT of travel on foot if you don't have a vehicle on tank maps. Small vehicles like motorcycles with a sidecar would be a nice addition.

The game seems popular in Europe (due to the setting I'm sure) and you'll hear many people with British, Swedish, etc accents talking on the microphone.

I hear TripWire wanted to focus on realism but I wonder if parts of the game are due to engine limitations. Walk up to a vehicle and fire at it and there's a very noticeable delay between the triggerpull and the bullet hitting the metal. You can't enter most buildings in villages; I guess to keep the combat focused more on tanks. They obviously made some compromises to realism, as game rounds are 20 minutes long and you can talk with teammates hundreds of yards away. In the first few hours of playing, expect to die ALOT. You'll get mowed down by machineguns and snipers and run over by tanks. Your vision gets blurry when you get hit or when an airstrike is raining down around you. There doesn't seem to be a crouch-jump so you can't climb over railings or over sandbags like you could in real life. You can practice offline with some bots, but there is really no training portion to be seen. New players should study the Game Controls screen and remember which keys they mapped and maybe look up tactics at http://www.redorchestragame.com. Going from having an awesome physics engine in Source games to Red Orchestra is a definite step down in my opinion.

Originally the graphics were muddy at 800x600 so I turned off HDR. Playing as a Rifleman at 800x600 with HDR on was a miserable experience. Everything seemed blurry and slow and I could almost never tell what I was aiming at. Once I changed the resolution to 1024x768 with High Texture Detail it looked MUCH nicer. Some maps are pretty dark and it's hard to make things out, but I guess that's where teamwork comes in. I bought the game before finding out it used the Unreal 2.5 engine and I keep wondering how it would look and play on the Source engine. I think some of the maps would make FANTASTIC DoD:S maps. I especially like Konigsplatz where Soviet tanks try to reach the Reichstag. There are 13 maps total, which is a nice change from DoD:S's original 4. But it seems silly that it takes 2 minutes for a map to load when the round takes 15-20 minutes. Since some maps are so big they can feel especially lonely; I suppose this is just more "realism" by Tripwire. Here's a quick overview of the maps:

Arad - Tank map. Easily won. Soviet and German tanks try to capture North Field/Village,South Field/Village. Sunny.
Baksan Valley - Infantry map. Capture/Hold church, ruins, old mill. Rainy, dark.
Barashka - Tank map. Use tanks and capture/hold 2 bridges, north/south banks. Snowy.
Basovka - Infantry map. Full of trenches. Capture/Hold AT gun position, command post, and train station. Sunny.
Bondarevo - Tank map. Drive through wheat fields and capture villages. Bright.
Hedgehog - Use tanks/half-track/armored car and capture farmhouses. Semi-auto sniper is available.
Kaukasus - Capture/Defend a mountain top fortress.
Konigsplatz - Tank map. Soviets must work their way through a destroyed Berlin to the Reichstag. Dark.
Kransyi Oktyabr - Infantry map. Capture/defend Central Yard, Petrol Yard, Garage, Conference Hall. Rainy.
Odessa - Infantry map. Soviets try to capture Apartments, Square, Tower, etc.
Ogledow - Tank map. Easily won. Capture a hill, a farm, and Ogledow.
Rakowice - Tank map. Snowy airfield. Downed planes. Armored car available.
StalingradKessel - Infantry map. Snowy. Soviets have to capture apartments, and trainyard.

The sound is great. Airstrikes and machinegun fire is frightening and tanks all sound like you would expect. German and Russian sayings sound good too. I read somewhere that all of the gun sounds are authentic.

I don't know if Red Orchestra is worth $25 when you can buy Half-Life 2 now for $30 and download free mods for it, but I suppose they're for different audiences. Since Red Orchestra was made by modders there should be an active modding community, but I wonder how many modders will want to charge for them, like Tripwire has done. I wonder if I can download and use other UT2K4 mods to use with RO, but I doubt it. It should be easy to get future updates via Steam. I wonder how many things will be changed when the boxed version is released by Bold Games.

In summary, once you get used to the controls and the game style, Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45 can be a fun game. It's MUCH slower paced than Day of Defeat: Source. After only a few hours of frustrated playing I wanted to give it a 3.0, but after playing more and getting the hang of things I'll give it a higher score, mostly due to the tank battles which I've never really experienced in a 3D game. I haven't played Battlefield 1942, but I could have bought the Anthology instead for $5 more, even if it is older. If you're coming straight from Day of Defeat: Source, you may want to wait for the demo unless you've got a great interest in Soviet warfare in the early 1940s. If you do buy it, I think you'll find it grows on you, but I can't help feeling a little disappointed.