Kingdom Hearts 3, Ace Combat 7.
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SANDSTORM IS EQUALLY brilliant as a co-op or competitive multiplayer game, offering competent large-scale 16v16 fights with vehicles but really excelling at tighter encounters on chokepoint-heavy maps with fewer combatants. The exact nature of the conflict you’re fighting and dying for is non-specific but the reference points span Black Hawk Down to Zero Dark Thirty via The Hurt Locker – in other words, a patchwork of post-millennium war in the Middle East. Among the men in bomb vests sprinting at you and the RPG fire, what stands out in particular is that no one’s playing the hero.
I haven’t played a multiplayer shooter as exciting as this for ages, and I’ll be coaxing friends into its co-op mode for months to come
Instead, every player-controlled and AI soldier sounds terrified. They shout out when they spot an enemy, when they need to reload, or when an objective state has changed, but they never sound like they’re relishing the fight like Call of Duty’s psychopathic operatives do. They’re bricking it, like any sensible person would do. I’d love to see the inner workings of Insurgency: Sandstorm’s code so that I could understand how developers New World Interactive manage to trigger appropriate canned dialogue at just the right junctures. That said, they’ve probably got their hands full, what with this game releasing, so walking an imbecile through their complex systems maybe isn’t the most sensible use of their time.
Nevertheless, the game’s unusually articulate soldiers have plenty of provocation to sound terrified in a given match, treated as they are to very few lulls in the action and bombarded by surprise attacks. Co-op consists of a series of checkpoint captures, in sequence, while AI attack each one in waves. Competitive modes, meanwhile, range from Hardpoint-like power struggles to traditional two or three point control scenarios. There’s no attempt to reinvent the wheel that’s turned at the centre of modern military online shooters, nor any great imperative to do so. Insurgency: Sandstorm just gets on with doing the fundamentals brilliantly.
If nits must be picked, it’s the vehicles that stick out for their rough and ready implementation. I’ve had some great moments in the gunner seat of a converted pickup, true, but the vehicle handling itself and the extent to which map design actually accommodates them just isn’t quite there.
Even with those creases, I haven’t played a multiplayer shooter as exciting as this for ages, and I’ll be coaxing friends into its co-op mode for months to come. I’ll also try – and occasionally fail – to describe just how good it sounds from moment to moment to anyone who’ll listen. See you at checkpoint C.