The unique sniper scope at work

Suppression greys and blurs the image

The inclusion of tanks helps to spice up the huge 64 player battlefields, and your jaw will scrape the ground when you first see the perfectly modeled and animated interiors. You can pilot a tank solo, letting the AI man any station that you're not inclined to (who wants to be a boring commander?), or you can load up these mobile metal killing machines with a bunch of friends. Whichever way you do it, you'll have to figure out how to do it yourself.After trying to RTFM, to my dismay I realized that there isn't one; it will require plenty of forum scouring to figure out the game's myriad of mechanics. The singleplayer campaign includes a series of tutorial, but it's doubtful many will bother this mode's tedious AI to do them. Playing as a standard foot grunt is difficult enough, but the game also has a complex squad leader and commander system that remains a mystery to me after 30+ hours of playing. In a nod to BF2, apparently the commander can call in different types of artillery and recon, and can also set objectives for each squad... not that I have any idea on how the hell to do so. My sole commander experience saw me looking at a cryptic map, bashing keys in a bid to rain hellfire down on the opposing team, which instead resulted in Windows Calculator opening. Thankfully GameSpy will have a beginner's guide in a few days that should clear up many of these mysteries.We'll also have a graphics guide showing you how to tweak the game's graphics options, which will prove to be very handy given the game's demanding system requirements. Being a PC exclusive it taxes even the best systems, though I was able to max all settings on my i5 2500k (4.5GHz), dual GTX 580 PC. The game pushes the Unreal 3 engine to breaking point, and captures the stunning devastation of WWII's shattered environments perfectly. The level designers aren't content with using textures to show the rough edges of a smashed wall; instead they've actually rendered each and every brick. The stunning presentation is let down slightly by the waxen character models, and their varied animations don't always gel seamlessly together. Overall the visual presentation is excellent though, and it's backed up by a captivating soundscape.Again, taking cues from the Battlefield series, every trooper calls out automatic voice prompts to signify what's happening around them, be it suppressing enemy soldiers, spotting tanks or dozens of other actions. Combined with a detailed manual voice command system, including the best taunt system we've ever trolled our opponents with, each character has literally hundreds of different things to say. Three channels of VOIP should make the lack of clear waypoint and objective markers bearable, but at launch voice support is horribly broken; fixing this needs to be a priority for the developers, as without voice to facilitate teamwork many battles devolve into frustrating stalemates.Broken VOIP isn't the only issue with RO2 at launch. To be blunt, at launch this game has more bugs than a Stalingrad defender's bed roll. Performance varies massively between similar system specs, and a server bug sees pings occasionally reaching stratospheric heights. Every now and then a tank will don a cloak of invisibility, and the server browser is only slight less painful than being shot in the groin. The list goes on and on, but I have the utmost faith that most will be remedied in the coming weeks. If it was a Codemasters game I'd be worried, but Tripwire Interactive has built an excellent reputation for post launch support. It's still highly playable, but the issues mean we can't help but knock a point off an otherwise perfect score. Come back in a month or two and it'll be a much smoother experience. Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad is the kind of shooter that can live only on the PC. It's far deeper than console shooters, and makes no concessions to accessibility to appeal to a casual audience. This is as hardcore as first person shooters get, and if you're prepared to put the time in to learn how to play it well, you'll be rewarded with a level of satisfaction that team deathmatch will never deliver. With the promise of free DLC on the horizon, as well as two Total Conversions already well into development, the game's life should prove to be as long as it is varied. Tripwire should be applauded for not being afraid to innovate, but at the same time I wonder if they've bitten off a little more than they could chew. Despite the bugs, this is the perfect shooter for those who like to exercise their intellect as much as their trigger fingers.I love the running stabathon of COD as much as the next guy, but there's something about realistic shooters like RO2 that really scratches my combat itch. Have you played RO2, or plan to?