Rising Storm is a realistic military based video game franchise that topped the Steam charts when it released as a mod for Red Orchestra 2 back in 2013, in fact PCGamer gave it an 86/100 when it first released. Later on the title was looked at as one of the best PC exclusive massive multiplayer war titles of all time and saw an exceptionally massive amount of hype when the news broke that Rising Storm 2 was happening. Rising Storm originally took place in World War II, fighting through the korean theater in huge 64 player battles and now it takes place in the what some would disclose as the worst war the United States ever took part of, Vietnam. Releasing fully after 8 different waves of beta on May 30th, the team at Tripwire released what will live on as a honest and amazing sequel to one of the world's best military simulators of all time. Tripwire kept true to the ways the developed in the first title with how brutal, unforgiving and realistic this style of shooter is. There are very minimal ways to learn how to get better, you die repeatedly until you learn to take it slow and embrace the combat system for what it is. Selling for $22.49 on its first week and then later at $25 for its official retail price, you truly are getting a bang for your buck. Ultimately, upon first launching Rising Storm 2, you notice a few things, one being that the super long and unnecessary loading times to get the game launched that you find in other Tripwire titles such as Killing Floor 2, are not present. You jump into the game relatively fast and are first greeted with some options that Red Orchestra players will find very nice. It allows you to choose between the new Rising Storm 2 keybindings or switch over to the old school Rising Storm/Red Orchestra set that veterans of the series will know and (maybe) love. Once you choose a set, you are always free to rebind whatever keys you want in the settings menu. Rising Storm 2 is full of those video options that make a PC game so glorious, from the unnecessary depth of field and (now removed, changeable in the .ini) motion blur settings to the vegetation and texture quality settings ranging from high to ultra. There are quite a few different menus you will encounter on the homepage besides the Play Online Now button that sends you over to a server browser such as Character Customization and Profile/Stats. It’s always great when a FPS tracks your stats so you can see what your most used guns are or what maps grant you the most wins. It’s also insanely satisfying to watch your Kill/Death ratio raise as you play more and gain more skill online. Seeing as Rising Storm 2 is one the first online shooters in the past few years that have no sort of microtransactions whatsoever besides the digital deluxe edition, it’s cool to see that the game grants you new gear to make your characters stand out in the treelines upon progressing through the games (now redone since beta) leveling and experience system. There’s nothing I want more in this game than to kill charlies with no shirt on, a pornstar mustache and be covered in tattoos while soaking in the massive heat of the Vietnam sun. There are four different teams that can be customized, for Vietnam, you get the NVA and the Viet-Cong Republic which have different variants of clothes and options to apply. America gets the normal US Army and the USMC (United States Marine Corps) to choose from. When you load up a game you’ll see some new game modes that weren’t introduced with the original game, like Supremacy or Territories. Supremacy is a game mode that has multiple objectives on a field that both teams have to capture, whoever captures the most by the end of the timer or by the time a team runs out of tickets, wins. Territories is a wave based mode that pushes the americans to take objectives from Vietnam pushing their spawns farther and farther back into their base, the game ends when either the americans run out of spawn tickets or the vietnam team loses every objective. Both game modes run flawlessly and feel perfectly unique, they tend to vary upon different maps. There are some smaller based modes that only pit 16 players instead of the usual 64 called Skirmish, however I didn’t get around to playing any of that. For the Supremacy and Territories modes, you only get five maps, which get old pretty fast, so that does tend to be a bummer however the multiple different player based classes you can play on do add some variety that tops off the fun. Personally, because the game is so cheap and the Tripwire teams are deciding to add more content in the future, I don’t mind the lack of content maps & modes wise that much. It’s still a very different style of game then you’ll find anywhere else on the Steam marketplace right now and it’s pretty refreshing. I’d have to say that right now, Rising Storm 2 is one of my top contenders for Game of the Year. It may still be very early to decide but we are now at the halfway mark for the year. I’d recommend everybody that digs first person shooters and wars from the past picks this game up given the opportunity, it’s dirt cheap and even cheaper if you pick it up on a site like CDKEYS. Tripwire is going to be constantly updating the title with small optimizations for performance and content so for now, I’ll be fighting in the treelines.
- Dakota G.
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