In the fall of last year, I had the opportunity to do an extended preview of New World Interactive‘s Insurgency – and was, to put it mildly, not very impressed. Insurgency follows in the footsteps of a great heaping mass of cookie-cutter tactical class-based multi-player shooters, and did so with very little in the way of originality or appeal.
And so after four months of work, on Wednesday 22 January, New World Interactive released Insurgency into one of the most crowded and competitive markets in the industry. Does Insurgency have what it takes to make more than a fleeting impression?
In short, the answer is still a no, albeit a far less resounding no.
Don’t get me wrong. I really appreciate what NWI is trying to do here. I understand completely, and I applaud. They are both targeting a hungry market, banking on a sure thing, and at least attempting to differentiate themselves from the crowd. In execution, we’ve gotten something between ARMA and Counter-Strike – something conceptually jaw-droppingly awesome. In execution, it is significantly less so.
Gameplay – 6 out of 10
I judge every title on a host of factors, but the most critical is an in-depth analysis of each titles specific ’30 seconds of fun’ – a design concept made famous by the Halo franchise. ’30 Seconds of Fun’ is a clear, concise way of describing precisely what the player experiences in the average 30 seconds of game-play.
Insurgency’s 30 Seconds of Fun consists of the following (Pick One):
- Select Role/Weapon. Spawn. Sprint for 25 seconds to the closest area of possible engagement, then crouch and check your sight-lines. Get sniped from nowhere and die, because you misjudged ROE.
- Select Role/Weapon. Join a different squad because someone is already playing your preferred class. Move slowly from cover-to-cover to avoid getting sniped like last time. Catch a flash of movement out of the corner of your eye, spin and fire. Get sniped from nowhere and die, because the flash of movement was a particle effect, and you gave away your position.
- Select Role/Weapon – This time, choose a battle rifle, because you’re tired of getting sniped. Move incredibly slowly, checking your corners carefully. Move around a corner and get flustered by movement. Drop five rounds from the hip, injure one of the enemies (maybe) and die because your Battle Rifle is woefully out-matched in CQC.
- Select Role/Weapon – Choose an SMG, because of your recent experience. Move even more slowly, flinching at every trace of movement, but not firing in order to not give away your position. Move to contested zone, and take a clean shot across the alley. Land 3 hits, none fatal, and get sniped because the people you’re shooting at have a friend. And he’s a sniper.
I have to be perfectly clear here. I know the reputation reviewers have – we’re terrible at games. In our defense, it’s because we need to experience as much of the game as possible, as quickly as possible. We approach things from a different standpoint – but I’ve played Insurgency on and off for the last three months, and I’ve approached it from every possible direction.
Short form, I figured out that the only fun to be had was to be the guy doing the sniping, and for all that, even from the winning side, Insurgency just isn’t that fun. It’s certainly more fun playing from the advantage, but it still just isn’t that fun.
At the end of the day, Insurgency is a markedly stereotypical title with a few ‘hyper-realistic’ features that definitively do a great deal to differentiate it from other similar titles, but in ways that are far from comprehensively positive. I can’t fault the intent, but the end result is underwhelming at best. There are some excellent choices made – the weapon and class customization are the real highlight – but it just doesn’t stand out.
Visuals – 5 out of 10
Workmanlike. Acceptable. Far from gorgeous, in a remarkably bland and repetitive manner, with art design that screams “I googled it,” or possibly “Yeah, we took inspiration from everything else in the genre for the last fifteen years.” I can’t say that anything is incredibly inept, but nothing, and I mean nothing is noteworthy.
Sound – 5 out of 10
No major improvements. Nothing has punch, nothing has bite, and it is completely lacking in any sense of identity. One would have hoped for the same dedication in accuracy in this department it strove for in game-play.
Tech – 5 out of 10
It doesn’t have any over-arching, glaring issues. It’s run well enough on both of my test rigs with an acceptable amount of instability, though I have had my share of crash issues -roughly one out of four matches crashes to desktop on both rigs. Solid work, but it’s not the most technically challenging work at the best of times.
The load times are both unnecessarily long for a title of this this complexity and oddly, worse than in the Beta.
Intangibles – 2 out of 10
As always, it must be taken into account that the Insurgency ‘franchise’ started as a mod, and that the budget could not have been massive. That the title works as well as it does is a testament to the hard work and dedication of the New World Interactive team, or possibly to the stability of the engine frame-work.
But at the end of the day, there isn’t anything really special or noteworthy about Insurgency, and that’s the problem. It’s not bad, not even a little – it’s really quite solid, but unless a dev team does something really innovative, or does something just that much better than the competition, almost any entry in this genre is a waste of time.
Interestingly enough, the greatest single quality of this title thus far is the player base – almost everyone I’ve encountered has been quite pleasant, team-oriented, and professional – and that is both unique and refreshing.
Overall 4.6 out of 10
There are qualities that bring us back to certain titles again, and again. There’s a very good reason why Borderlands, or Counter-Strike, or League of Legends sees millions of hours of game-play from a massive cross-section of the market and other titles are picked up, played for five minutes and dropped. Some formulas work really, really well, and some do not.
Insurgency is very hard to divorce from Counter-Strike – it began as a mod for Valve’s multiplayer titan, and its core gameplay is identical. It has a far more realistic attitude towards gun physics and movement, the ability to neutralize certain useful enemy assets, and it features a truly excellent class and weapon customization system, but the central dynamic is still very much Counter-Strike.
The unfortunate truth is, when the central game-play principles greatly resemble another title, you have to distinguish yourself sufficiently, or beat the original title at its own game. Regrettably, Insurgency does neither.