Life with Uncle Joe at your back wasn’t easy, and Red Orchestra 2 isn’t prepared to pretend it was. Death through blood loss, realistic bullet drop and spin, and an all-but-absent HUD all conspire to send players running back to the Californian comforts of CoD.
Consequently, you have to ease would-be comrades in gently. And that’s exactly what the next few days of Steam are all about.
Red Orchestra 2 will be free today for a full 24 hours, though at the time of writing it hasn’t shown up. So long as you add it to your library before the promotion ends, it’ll be yours to keep.
After that, Steam will roll straight into a free weekend for Rising Storm, Red Orchestra 2’s Pacific Front expansion. That’ll be temporary – but a discount will stand throughout the weekend.
“If you’ve been trying to convince a friend to play Red Orchestra 2 with you, there will be no better time than [today],” wrote Steam’s newsbots.
When our Rob first played Red Orchestra 2: Rising Storm, he was struck “both by how cleverly Tripwire’s Rising Storm team are adapting features of the Pacific war into novel game mechanics, and the drastically asymmetrical tactics those mechanics impart to the game.”
There are certainly still no other shooters quite like Red Orchestra – even as the mainstream plays with the idea of asymmetry in Titanfall and Evolve. Remember when Tripwire head John Gibson told us that Call of Duty has “almost ruined a generation of shooter players”?
But maybe you’ve bounced off Red Orchestra before now?