This is going to be one of those long reviews, so I'll start with a short overview. If you only want a short review, just read that.

Buy this game. It's great. It feels great, controls smooth, looks quite good, has a great atmosphere, some good communities scattered in there, and it takes skill, teamwork, and tactics to play well, but not at the expense of tension or gameplay. It's not quite as realistic as Arma, but it's so much more tense and immersive. It's my FPS dream come true.

Okay, now comes the long bit.

Red Orchestra isn't a perfect simulation of war, but it feels so real, the sense of fear is so palpable, the triumph of finally getting good and learning to hit moving targets, of finally learning how to handle yourself in a combat situation so that you can kill as many of the enemy as possible - that is better than any milsim's realism.

Somebody once asked me if Red Orchestra 2/Rising Storm is as hard as they'd heard. Here's what I told them.

"Let me put it to you this way.

It's not too difficult to learn how to shoot accurately. Not getting shot is the difficult part. You have to learn to check every corner of every room that you enter. Check the ceiling if the building is more than one story, since there are often holes in the second floor. Become obsessive about checking for the enemy. It'll keep you alive longer. Not forever, though. Why would you want to live forever? Make your inevitable death mean something. Never cross open ground if you can avoid it. Move from cover to cover when there is some, which is rare enough, and when there isn't, you'd better hope your squad leader hasn't thrown his smoke grenade yet, because the enemy machine gunner 100 meters away whose muzzle flash is the only thing you can see as your buddy's stomach turns into a large-caliber hole, well, that enemy is going to cut you to pieces if you don't have a smokescreen up. If you see the enemy and you're moving, you're dead already, so don't worry about learning to stop moving and respond.

Shooting accurately is easy if you know when to shoot. Don't try to shoot when you aren't behind some sort of cover. Make sure that it's actual solid cover and not just a piece of corrugated metal or a bush, because bullets go through those, and your muzzle flash will give you away. There's no crosshair. To shoot from the hip and get a kill, you have to be up close and personal, good, in possession of a full-auto weapon, and very lucky. Don't shoot from the hip if you can avoid it. Use your iron sights. No scope for you, unless you earn it with the blood of thousands of enemies. If you've been sprinting for too long, your weapon sways and you can't hit anything. Bullets drop, and they travel at something like 800m/s, though it varies from weapon to weapon, so you have to lead your target (the amount you lead by varies from weapon to weapon as well for the aforementioned reason) and adjust the zeroing on your rear sight if you want your bullets to go anywhere near where you point your weapon. If you are a rifleman, your job is not just to kill the enemy, but to die so that the guy behind you can figure out the location of the enemy who killed you and kill him, making the next 10 meters clear for your squad to advance. The needs of your team outweigh your life. Get used to it.

So you're sure you're in a good firing position. Now line up the shot. Lining up the shot is easy if you can see the enemy. Seeing the enemy is hard. You look for a slightly darker shade of gray or brown in a gray-brown hell that is of no real strategic importance, but your orders are to fight for it anyway, so you do. You look for a slightly different shade of green in a sweltering jungle which has already given you malaria and has rotted your uniform to tatters. If you can see the enemy, assume they can see you. Don't move. The human eye picks up movement much better than it does a slight difference in color. Wait for your chance. Shoot. Wait to see the blood, but as soon as you do, move. You've given away your position. Find a new one.

So you've lined up the shot. It's not difficult to line up the shot if you can do all these things and survive long enough. Pulling the trigger is harder at first. I used to miss on purpose every so often, when I was new to the game. I'm a pacifist in real life, and thought I was doing good, since we're all just scared boys trying to survive in a meat grinder. But no. I've seen too many of my friends die to miss on purpose now. I've been through too much ♥♥♥♥.

Everybody around you is going to die. You've accepted this. You're going to die. You're never going to make it home again. But you want to stay alive as long as possible, for some sick, twisted, perverted reason. Part of you would rather die. You've seen men screaming for their mothers as they writhe around in puddles of their blood, staring with soulless eyes at their mangled limbs and exposed intestines. There's no time for a man to be incredulous when he realizes he will never use his legs or genitals again even if he survives. There's only time for pain.

God, you want it to end. But something keeps pushing you onwards, forcing you to do whatever it takes to survive even though you'd rather end it all before the enemy does, because it's all going to end soon anyway. The enemy will never make it home again either. They're all going to die. What does it matter if you happen to kill one of them? From the moment he was assigned to this front, he was dead. You are just the man holding the rifle that causes his death. Somebody else would kill him if you didn't, and maybe if you kill him, you and your friends might survive a few minutes longer. You want those few minutes, even though they will only bring pain, terror, and possibly the shell with your name on it that rips off your arm above the elbow and bathes the snow in warm blood that steams as it cools.

Prepare to die. You are nobody. You are no longer a gamer. You were never a gamer. You used to be a peasant boy from Siberia who dreams of becoming a novelist. You used to be a butcher's son from Bavaria whose sweetheart has promised to marry him when Russia is defeated. You used to be Horace Mann High School's baseball star who joined the Marines since he wasn't good enough for college ball. You used to be the proud child of an old sword-making family from Nakatsu. You used to be these things, but now you're nobody. You don't have a mouse and keyboard. You used to have a plow, but now you turn over the soil with artillery. You used to have a girl's hand to hold, but now you only caress your rifle. You used to have a baseball you played catch with, but now you play catch with grenades. You used to watch your father slide the swords into cold water to harden them, but now you watch bayonets plunge into the warm entrails of your friends. You are cannon fodder. You're not special. You are a cog in a great machine, a machine that has plenty of other cogs willing to take your place when you are no longer useful. You are just one of 25 million cogs.

So, yeah. It's difficult. But be thankful it's not real. For millions, it was."

I cannot recommend this game enough. If you want a story-driven campaign, or good AI, or easy kills, look elsewhere. But give this a shot. It's so damn good. I've never been to war, and I'm so lucky to be able to say that. I'll never kill anybody in real life if I can help it. But this game took me out of my room and put me in the middle of the most brutal war in history better than any tightly-scripted CoD campaign ever could. It's the most immersive game in existence. Try it.

Good game, seriously.

I like this game!

Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad is the follow-up to Tripwire's original hit multiplayer PC title, Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45, which has gone on to sell nearly half a million units since launch. This time, the game will feature a greatly expanded multi-player experience, with multiple new game modes, a complete first person cover system, destructible terrain, enhanced weapon mechanics and realistic WWII combat made truly accessible. In addition, the game will feature single-player and co-op game modes, allowing the player to play a full campaign from the Russian and, for the first time in a first person shooter, from the German point of view. Tripwire's renowned weapon handling improved even further, with new features and sounds. And tanks created with fully-operational 3D interiors, hugely enhancing the original game’s vehicle experience

Red Orchestra 2 is the best murder simulator I've ever played. It's not the best first-person shooter or multiplayer game, or even the best team-based multiplayer game. It's certainly not the best World War II game, and its singleplayer is the worst I've played in years. But in the killing, and in the being killed, Red Orchestra 2 is a terrifying and satisfying experience.

Let's talk about you for a minute. You're a soldier in either Hitler or Stalin's army, and you're ♥♥♥♥-scared. You've got your back against the wall in a room with one door, two windows and three walls, and you're peeking around a corner into the exposed core of a half-destroyed building. Every room could conceal an enemy soldier, and you've died a hundred times already, always from that one angle you didn't check.

Looking down through the rubble, you see an enemy soldier break from behind a wall. You aim and fire in a single motion. You've shot him and now he's dead. It's exactly like a million other games, but it feels nothing like any other game. It's the little things that make the difference, such as the sound of your own breathing when you lifted the rifle to your face, and the way it bobbed slightly in your hands. It's in the mark on your enemy's chest where the bullet hit, and the way his blood spritzed from his back, marking that bullet's exit. It's in the way he fell, forced by some terrible weight. Sometimes, but not this time, it would be the way he clutches his stomach, yelling in Russian, or the way he fires his machinegun madly during his last few seconds of life.

I highly recommend this game!

Chunky and choppy gameplay NO MORE!

Unlocking the frame rate:

Locate the ROEngine.ini inside: "C:\Users\User\Documents\My Games\RedOrchestra2\ROGame\Config" and open it with Notepad.

Locate a paramter that looks like this:

bSmoothFrameRate=TRUE
MinSmoothedFrameRate=22
MaxSmoothedFrameRate=62
Set "MaxSmoothedFrameRate=62" to "MaxSmoothedFrameRate=144" - I've used 144 as an example.
Note: Setting "bSmoothFrameRate=FALSE" will uncap the limit but you will only be able to get 90 frames.

Find the remaining MaxSmoothedFrameRate lines (use Ctrl + f) and set their values to the desired amount (there are 2 MaxSmoothedFrameRate and 2 bSmoothFrameRate to edit)

Now test using either the steam FPS overlay or alternatively open the console ingame with "~" and type in "Stat FPS".

All credit goes to https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=348433594

Clunky mechanics and tents pitched everywhere but still the best WW2 FPS out there.

Best $5 that I ever spent on steam, have played many more hours than the 140 I have on steam on a disc copy. This game, to sum it up frankly, is the greatest shooter game I've played in my entire life. It blends together perfectly; from the firefights, to the the crawling in the muddy trenches, to ''HURRAH'' charging as the Soviets towards certain death in the form of a MG34 machine gun, to watching your buddies get shot in the stomach and bleed out all the while screaming in agony, to sprinting from broken tree to shell crater dodging fire. This game has it all, a perfect blend of hardcore and tactical shooter

BUT

I have yet to reveal this games most outstanding quality. This game does something that very few other games can do (I can count on my hand the number of other games that compete with this game in this aspect), and that is to create teh atmosphere of war. Red Orchestra 2 does this better than any game in my opinion.

DISCLAIMER

This game will give you PTSD, no doubt. I remember the first time that I played it and jumped into a game and selected the Rifleman class. I (foolishly) charged around towards the river on Bridges and saw my friend get hit directly by an Anti-tank rifle, removing his legs. I was in shock and continued running only to be hit by a mortar shell and be dismembered. I took a second and realized that this game was nothing like any other game that I had played; I legitemately felt fear. I was terrified to poke my head out of the trench, only to get killed by a rifleman. I was scared to run from crater shell to crater shell, with bullets whizzing all around me. I was horrified to find that grenades inside houses do not bode well for the occupants. #bestPTSDsimulator2k16

This game... what else can be said about this game. It is fantastic in every element, although being a few years dated (2013). I will continue to play this game until the next one comes out, Rising Storm 2 Vietnam, but even then I'm sure that I will keep coming back to this one. In closing, I give this game a perfect score of 10.0/10.0. Two thumbs up, absolutley perfect. I wouldn't change anyting in this game and for the love of God, buy this game. :)

My dad bought this game for him self, he got me to play this as well and i stuck to it.Good fun, good communnity.

Don't lose your arm.. You will need it to shove a bayonet in the next person you see

Red Orchestra 2: Heroes Of Stalingrad With Rising Storm
fast game with modern day graphics with easy controls that moves from location A to B to C and so on,
good amount of action and special effects,
good amount of multiplayer

good game.