Review: Rising Storm puts you into WWII's Pacific Theatre

July 09, 2013

You can talk about all the fancy graphics, crazy guns and manic run-and-gun gameplay all you want, but the modern shooters of today are missing that special something—immersion. Rising Storm is different. Red Orchestra 2's expansion, Rising Storm, takes you away from the European theater of WWII and throws you deep into the jungle and beaches of the Pacific. It lacks the glamour and polish of games like Call of Duty and Battlefield, but it compensates with the rarified charm that comes from spending a few hours in a Pacific Rim trench. The average Rising Storm match looks less like a competitive videogame than a scene cut from a World War II documentary. We won't truly ever be able to understand what the soldiers of WWII went through, but Rising Storm may be the closest I'm willing to get. Iwo Jima is dark, gritty and large. A recipe for a violent encounter. Huddled in a foxhole on the beach of Iwo Jima or in a ravaged trench in the jungles of Guadalcanal, you keep your head down as you hear, and feel, the bullets whizzing by. Rising Storm does suppression so well, you can't help but freeze and retreat slowly, crawling on your stomach until you feel relatively safe. If all hell begins to break loose around you, the screen grays out, a red pulsing color surrounds the screen, sound becomes garbled and you lose your ability to zoom. All you can do is hunker down and hope it stops so you can regain your composure. The MG placements don't have a lot of ammo but will stop a soldier instantly. But video games have taught us that bullets aren't that scary. You get shot a few times, you run to cover and wait until the screen stops glowing—time heals all wounds. Not here though—here, the danger is real. One well-placed shot can send you right back to the respawn queue where you wait up to 20 seconds to respawn back where you started—a significant sprinting distance away. Even if the shot doesn't kill you, you only have a short time to use one of your two bandages to patch up before you bleed out. Staunch the bleeding and you'll still be hobbled: a leg wound means you can't run as quickly, while a wounded arm will skew your aim. Suffer a wound to the heart and head and, well...you're dead. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2040849/review-rising-storm-puts-you-into-wwiis-pacific-theatre.html#tk.rss_reviews