Not only do we cover all of the latest and greatest here at Strategy Informer, but we also try to help generate awareness of the lesser known titles as well - you'd be surprised by what you could find from the middle of the road publishers. You'll remember last year at GamesCom we brought you news of the sequel to the cult hit Red Orchestra. Now, with only a couple of months left, Strategy Informer has finally managed to get some hands on with Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad to put it through its paces.
 

It's like I've always said: Bayonets make everything better. Stabby stabby!

The key to enjoying Red Orchestra 2 is going to be the hardcore aspects and the overall experience. Whilst it's not the ugliest game you've ever seen graphically - in fact it's pretty decent by AAA standards - upcoming titles like Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3 will look better. But what RO2 more than makes up for it in terms of intelligence and atmosphere. All too quickly, we realised that the run and gun tactics favoured by COD will not work as you just get shot in the face. This is a thinking man's shooter, set during one of the most intense battles in history, and together that's a powerful combination.

We're not sure if the amount of realism in this game reaches ArmA levels, but it's still pretty insane. There's very little direct feedback to the player, although they do employ some nice visual and audio tricks for guidance. For example, if you're being 'suppressed' (whereby someone is firing a lot of bullets in your direction) your vision becomes blurry and you'll find it hard to take action. Similarly, the background music changes depending on whether you're team is winning or not. If you get hit, a body indicator does come up to show where you were hit, and names do appear above the heads of your teammates.
 

In Soviet Russia, Tank Drive You

Running through (one of) the streets of Stalingrad, every war movie/documentary you've ever seen suddenly comes back to you all at once. You'll find yourself covering the rear and backing up as your squad mates rush forward, you'll dive from cover to cover, all to avoid that dreaded death screen. Key to this is Tripwire's rather unique first-person cover system: Much like any Gears-like cover system works, you tap a key to snap yourself to a valid cover point (although it's not made clear what is and is not a valid cover point. You just have to use your common sense).

Once snapped, you can peak over, slide along, lean out/up and fire, and even fire blind. It can take some getting used to, but once you get the hang of it, it will be a life saver in firefights, although by no means does it make you invincible to harm. Even things like ammo, you can only really tell when you need to reload by looking at the gun itself, and to borrow a page from Operation Flashpoint's book, you'll be remembering Knox's rules of always keeping a full mag, and sticking to cover.

We know this preview is a little thin on actual details, but you can always read our first preview to get to the technical stuff. From what we can tell, little has changed from the vision as presented to us in Cologne - there's still the non-linear single-player campaign, the ten different maps of Stalingrad, the different classes, the 'Hero' status, the vehicles, squad commands, support abilities... pretty much everything you'd want on a wish list for the ultimate World War Two shooter.

The only thing we're not sure on at the moment is the current state of destructibility in the game, although touched on a little bit were the gun emplacements, and how they can be destroyed. They've also included many prototype weapons into the game that were experimented with during the war. They'll also be showing realistic tank crew animations for everyone manning the vehicles, which is a nice touch.
 

"Er..., where does this go again?"

The only shame here is that Tripwire has no plans to bring this game to the console audience currently- personally I think this hardcore approach is sorely missing from the console-FPS market at the moment. On the other hand, at least this game will be free of the dangers of going for that mass market appeal. At the moment, the August 30th release date is looking pretty solid, so we can't wait to get our hands on this game for some epic WW2 action.

Most Anticipated Feature: The support abilities, and how easily they can tie into the game.