On the command interface you’ve got some interesting features as well. Artillery now comes in varying shapes and sizes to help you better nail the opponents. You can have more confined damage via mortar bombardment or far larger damage with a rocket attack. How do you know where to aim that artillery when you can’t see the opponents? Call in a recon plane to have a have look around then pull out your binoculars and bring the rain.
The rain will destroy almost everything in its path. While the terrain isn’t deformable, buildings can be bombed to a pile of rubble. Sure, there will still be skeletons in plae so you can use them as cover and strategic points. After all, it would be no fun to play on a completely flat surface if everything was brought to the ground.
To give the game a more epic feel they’re using dynamic music based on the moral of your team. Each team, German and Russian, has their own music and it ranges from somber when you’re not doing so well to triumphant when you are.
Included in the cover system are some things to help make the game a little better. For example, your weapon will move out of view when you’re in cover and can’t shoot but when you’re able to blind fire it will move into a ready state that allows you to see the weapon. This lets you know when you can blind fire and when you can’t. No more scrambling for cover only to find that you are stuck without an angle. Speaking of angles, often you can’t get a good one when enemies are too far below you. Now you can, as they’ve improved the cover system to let you look over cover and down so that you can fire from cover while in a strategically better position higher than your opponents.
As the game is focused on multiplayer it wouldn’t be right if they didn’t include a new mode and that they have done. Countdown is sort of one-life mode, but done in stages. So every member of your team has one life to give for the cause while attempting to gain an objective. But when the objective it gained all members of both teams respawn and the attackers begin heading for the next one. Now it sucks when you get all the stage objectives and then the entire team dies before the main one is taken. to fix that suckage, they’ve included a key objective that basically gives the attackers one Mulligan, without having to yell "do over!" It gives the attacking team one extra full team respawn should you happen to drop the ball.
What all of that allows for is much larger single-life maps. With the built in stages it means they can expand the map multiple times over, giving you a much richer experience, and still maintain the basics of the game mode. Pretty cool stuff in action.
Speaking of multiplayer modes, aside from Countdown there’s also Territory, Fire fight (team deathmatch), Co-op skirmish where you and a friend can go up against the AI and co-op campaign so you never have to play alone if you don’t want to. They are shooting to max out players in a game at 64 (with quite large maps one would imagine) and there are ten maps in the game already.
We didn’t get to see a lot of the game or play it but it looks to be progressing rather nicely and is certainly going to bring Red Orchestra back to the front of the first-person genre. It’s definitely something that we’ll be keeping an eye on here at GDN.
We’ll get the press kit images and videos up just as soon as we can!
