Insurgency is smartly camped on a spawn point between two of the better online tactical shooters: Counter-Strike and Red Orchestra. Slower and more open than the former, but on a smaller scale (with more concentrated action) than the latter, it’s a great midway point that gives you more to think about during the action than simply shooting the other team, but also keeps its pace moving quickly enough that matches don’t turn into 45-minute slogs.

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As you'd imagine with a game set in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, the soundtrack is the crisp snap of modern weaponry. Developer New World Interactive has done a good job with those weapons: you don't just pick a class in Insurgency: after selecting a from the locals or the peacekeepers/foreign devils, picking a class and joining a squad, then you tweak your loadout through an impressively flexible system. You can snap off the optics and spend those supply points on an under-barrel grip and suppressor, making the rifle more controllable and quiet for sneaky close-quarters combat; or you could boost the optics and add weight to the barrel, creating a decent long-range rifle out of an M16A4. That spread of numbers extends to the rest of your equipment, so you could sacrifice a side arm and grab more grenades, creating intriguing little sub-classes that keeps both you and the enemy on your toes. It's a good system, yet there’s a huge and obvious flaw: you can't save your loadouts. It's incredibly satisfying to tweak your kit, but doing so each time you play is really clumsyDeath will come from dark corners, through tiny gaps, fired by unseen people. But that's okay. Insurgency’s a slow game, and it pushes you to aspire to join those hidden killers. Of the many modes and maps available (five and 12, respectively, which are mostly a set up for different territorial-control modes), most have a nice mix of open areas leading to buildings and back alleys. Thanks to a heavy emphasis on territorial control, there's a lot of movement, so I was never quite comfortable in any one position. I never found a corner in any of them that can't be flanked or sniped, which is smart level design that works to keep you edgy.Though there is one huge flaw in the gunplay as well: headshots results in instant death, but the weakness of ankles and elbows also puts you in a lot of danger. I’ve killed a lot of people with a burst of fire aimed at a heel poking out from behind cover. Dying because you took a hit to the ankle almost literally shoots Insurgency’s real-world tactical vibe in the foot.It's a strange design choice, because Insurgency otherwise gets a lot right: scoping raises your body slightly, and a lot of the cover has been designed to take into account that little adjustment, so you can hide and pop up just above the cover just when you're firing. You can adjust your mouse sensitivity for when you're zoomed in, enabling for twitch responses zoomed out, and slower aiming when you're iron-sighting or scoping. You can even add a little boost to your zoom by holding shift when you're not moving. You're not just aiming a crosshair, but balancing all those little tweaks on the fly. It's not quite Arma III -level control, but it doesn't need to be. It's a pleasant layer of thought on top of the usual mouse-clickery.A well-laid-out floating UI helps to make sense of some complex game modes. My favourite is Search & Destroy, where the attackers are informed of potential positions, but there are more markers than real caches. Control points are used here to control your team's respawn, so you need to be in immediate and total control or you risk being overwhelmed by a more dominant enemy. You can easily follow friends with tracking diamonds floating on the screen, showing each player's position. Cache markers do the same for objectives. Both are subtle and unobtrusive, and make following the flow of the fight an easy task. In turn, that knowledge helps team play emerge without feeling forced. Perhaps I was just lucky in my choice of servers (or perhaps the community is so tiny that the only people playing are pros) but people I didn't talk to or order around knew exactly where to be, and by paying attention you'll start to recognise moments where suppressing fire is needed, or when it's best to toss a smoke grenade to mask a control point from the enemy or AI.Oh yeah: the AI. Insurgency has a co-op mode where you clear the level of competent and sometimes-vicious bots, which is good practice. To their credit, I learned a fair bit about the art of concealing myself as I was playing against the automatons.As I mentioned before, a lot of the map design has been measured to take into account how you use cover. That means the more successful spaces are the urban areas, where entire games play out like those final, tense moments of a Counter-Strike match. I particularly enjoy District, where the corners are terrifying and even boarded-up windows can be knocked out and shot through. Here, and in most of the other maps, running is only an option if you're making a dash across an open area; the rest of the time you'll want to be bent double, sneaking, even crawling. Less exciting are the mountainous levels, where the clean lines give way to rolling terrain, which makes getting a grip of the angles a lot tougher. There's also one – Heights – that has a hideous amount of bloom. It's blindingly ugly, though it's in the minority. Most are great places to spend 10 minutes of your time.