New World Interactive is currently testing its upcoming FPS game Insurgency: Sandstorm with a beta on PC, and here you can see what it looks like.
The beta includes two gameplay modes, PvP and co-op, and while you could call Insurgency: Sandstorm a “hardcore” first-person shooter, the gameplay you’ll see below belongs to the latter, which is a bit more suitable for me. You probably know by now that I am pretty softcore at shooters. It’s not for lack of trying. I’m just bad.
That being said, the co-op mode isn’t a cakewalk. The bots in the game are actually pretty skilled, aggressive, and numerous. They’re able to push hard and defeat even decent teams of players (especially if they’re not coordinated in voice). In fact, you’ll notice in the video below that they manage to beat my team pretty early on the first try.
One of the largest reasons is what makes Insurgency: Sandstorm “hardcore” to begin with: bullet lethality is through the roof compared to more casual-friendly games like Battlefield or Call of Duty. Shots that would kill or incapacitate a person in real life can do the same in this game. This means that if a bot gets the jump on you and puts a well-placed hole or two in a vital area of your body, you’re dead before you can blink. There is also no regeneration allowing you to just wait for a wound to automatically heal.
On top of that, one of the game’s keywords is scarcity: this applies to information (there is no minimap and the hud is minimalistic) and supplies.
One of my favorite elements is the ammo clip system: You have a certain number of clips, but when you swap, you simply take that clip out of your gun and put it back into your bags to replace it with a new one. When you go back to that clip, it’ll have exactly the same bullets you left it with. The “magical” merging of clips featured in most shooters is gone, and you actually need to pay attention. You can also double-tap the key for a “quick reload” that will completely discard the clip regardless of how many bullets you have left in it, wasting less time.
You won’t automatically reload your gun: in the chaos of combat (and battles can get very chaotic in Insurgency: Sandstorm), you will often find yourself trying to shoot from an empty magazine until the desperate “click, click, click” of your firing mechanism finally wakes you up from your oblivious shooting frenzy.
This (and more) combines into a game that is definitely rather unique among today’s mainstream and very forgiving shooters. You can check what it looks like out below and laugh at my mistakes and pathetic attempts to get better at the shooter genre. It’s gonna take a while, and I’m not getting any younger.
If you want to read more about Insurgency: Sandstorm, you can read about New World Interactive’s stance on progression, unlockables, cosmetics, microtransactions, and the lack of loot boxes.