Rising Storm is the multiplayer stand-alone expansion to Tripwire Interactive’s Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad that was released back at the end of may this year. The game plays similarly in most regards to Red Orchestra 2, but moves the focus from the battlefields of eastern Europe during WWII to the Pacific theater of the war. In it, you will be playing as either a member of the United States Armed Forces, or a soldier of Imperial Japan and will be thrown against your enemies in a very immersive experience that will leave you feeling satisfied after each victory, and with a stinging sense of loss after each defeat. The game features a class system to it, so each time you spawn you will be able to change what you would like to play as. There are a limited number of slots to be filled in each class, so it’s not like you will see entire teams toting around flamethrowers or light machine guns in a battle, and classes such as the sniper will only have one or two slots available per team. What makes this game stand apart from Red Orchestra 2 is how differently these armies play, not just compared to the Wehrmacht or Red army played in the base game, but to how they play against each other in the expansion.
Note: the graphics are actually much better than this.
The United States armed forces, either the Marine Corps or the Army in this game, Gets it’s advantage from its raw firepower. While the loadout has minor changes depending on what map you are playing on to try and keep it historically accurate, the lowliest and most numerous American soldier, the Rifleman, is armed with a semi-automatic rifle, the M1 Garand. This puts them at a distinct advantage to their Japanese counterparts who have to rely on their older bolt-action rifles to do the same job. The Americans also have Access to the BAR, a fully automatic rifle which is able to lay down a truly devastating amount of firepower in the hands of a skilled player. Additional weapons worth noting include the Winchester Model 1912, a shotgun which is a good weapon that doesn’t really have a Japanese counterpart, much like the BAR, and the Colt M1911A1 which while having a Japanese counterpart in the form of the Nambu type 14 pistol, is just a wonderful sidearm that is capable of dropping enemies at close to medium range range as effectively as many of the primary weapons you will use. The crown jewel of the American arsenal is by far the M2-2 Flamethrower. This weapon is what you want to use if you are going to be stuck in tight quarters that offer a lot of cover. If you can get close enough to the enemy with it, taking out entire waves of reinforcements in seconds is easily a possibility. There is a limit of three flamethrowers available per team however, and doling out large amounts of fire at a time will leave your tanks empty fairly quickly. It should be noted that you cannot refill the ammo for the flamethrower as you can any other weapon in the game, but you do have a secondary weapon at your disposal, with sidearms like the Colt M1911A1 and the M1 carbine you won’t really be at too much of a disadvantage.
To try and balance how uneven the weapons these two armies use against each other were, Tripwire gave Imperial Japan a few tricks of its own. For explosives, the Japanese have access to a class that wields the Type 89 Knee Mortar. This can be used for either direct or indirect fire, and as it is a mortar you should be able to guess that it lobs goddamned explosives over a fair amount of distance. In the hands of a skilled player, this can be almost as effective as a flamethrower, and has the advantage that it can be supplied at the ammo dumps around the maps. It also does not replace your primary weapon, so you are still able to bring a rifle into the fight if you need to. The other explosive trick they have is that they are able to bury their grenades in dirt surfaces that then act as traps that are set off when someone steps on them. This can be particularly hilarious in close quarters when you have upwards of five men huddled together as they advance. The final, and greatest ability the Imperial Army/Navy possesses is the Banzai charge. While every other army in the game has the ability to mount bayonets on some of their weapons and charge in screaming with said bayonets at the ready (which was something no one ever seemed to expect was going to happen in the base game, and so was actually a viable strategy,) the Japanese actually gets bonuses when the do this, and almost every weapon they have can mount a bayonet. This bonus increases with the amount of nearby teammates you have charging with you, and comes in the form of a resistance to suppression, which is a thing in game, and causing all nearby enemies to become suppressed. While I have no actual clue if it is actually a thing, it also seems like enemies charging take reduced damage to some extent. There are Squad leader classes that you can take, and one commander class available per team, and for the Japanese these classes come with swords. These swords kill enemies in a single strike with the added bonus of actually severing limbs if you hit them. These swords also add to the bonuses if an officer in the charge is wielding one.
There are more maps than Iwo Jima.
On occasion you will find an American who has killed one of your sword wielding comrades, has picked up his blade, and is now running around like a jackass dicing up even more of your brothers-in-arms. The only honorable way to deal with this is of course to pull out your own blade, assuming you have one, and best him in a sword fight. Shooting him is just dishonorable, and you should feel ashamed if you do.
Also, for added shits and giggles, the Japanese do not lose points or reinforcement tickets for killing themselves so long as the take at least one enemy with them in the process.
I should mention that there are other classes than the ones mentioned above that both armies have access too, but are largely similar. Both sides have a machine gun class, sniper class, and assault class that utilises submachine guns and grenades for close quarters combat. The Squad leaders mentioned above have access to smoke grenades, which can greatly help out an assault, and can mark targets for the Commander. The Commander on both sides has a variety of abilities, including calling in recon, ordering everyone else around because he is the goddamned commander, marking his own targets or using the targets provided to him by his squad leaders for the various artillery strikes he can call in, and he can force a respawn if there is an emergency that he needs more men to fix that still have to wait for the next wave to come in before they can rejoin the battle.
Of note is that even when your team can clearly see where your artillery will be coming down, and even if you yell at them that it will be coming in, as well as announcing in in your team chat, you will still get the occasional guy whining about having a brief but intense bombardment on a capture point because he ran in there like a dumbass despite the numerous warnings. Jokes on him too, because immediately after that we captured that point and won.
The AI in this game goes from being almost too good at times, to being downright stupid at others. At medium range they can, and will occasionally pull of damn near miraculous shots while in a full sprint that will more often than not leave you a little miffed. In close combat the AI just kind of shits out though. Sure, it will try to cut into you with it’s bayonet occasionally, but it takes way too much time half the time for it to think to do this, and so unless you either have to fight of 3 to 4 of them at a time, or if you get extremely unlucky you will come out on top. This is a problem since at the time I last played this the community wasn’t exactly large, so many matches will be a handful of people on each team with AIs to fill in the spaces left over. It actually presents a difficulty for the Japanese team if there is a lack of players. Most of your wins as Japan will come from using the tactics and equipment listed above, and the AI uses none of them.
Overall, the best thing about this game is just how sucked in you get to each engagement. Ducking from cover to cover while artillery rains down and as you end up getting stuck cowering in some cater while your squad mate lies next to you bleeding to death screaming for his mother tends to make the whole experience fairly intense. At times it can get a bit stressful, but in the end the experience is worth it.
While it is not without it’s problems, Tripwire Interactive has delivered a very enjoyable game that one could easily sink many hours into. A solid 8.75/10
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