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Insurgency: Sandstorm is, much like its direct predecessor, the first Insurgency title, a bit of a testament to the pervasiveness of the hardcore FPS sub-genre. Of course, it is a given that there is a market for virtually every genre and sub-genre of video-game under the sun, but whereas arcade shooters such as Call of Duty seemingly have to reinvent themselves every so often, hardcore FPS games do note face this problem to such an extent.
Two particular “tastes” are going to be catered to with this article: we’ll talk a bit about what makes Insurgency: Sandstorm such a special little thing, with it representing the more arcade-oriented team-based tactical FPS, while SQUAD will be featured as an example of the full-blooded mil-sim niche.
To understand what makes your average tactical shooter tick, first we need to explain what the draw of such games is. In truth, and though it may not seem to be the case at first, gunplay takes more of a backseat the more hardcore the game we’re discussing gets. Whereas Insurgency: Sandstorm straddles the fine line between a fully-fledged mil-sim and a more arcade FPS experience, SQUAD goes all in instead. To compare with an average Call of Duty release, Insurgency focuses much more prominently on objective-based gameplay instead of simply tasking you with racking up kills willy-nilly.
In fact, even the game’s takedown-oriented game mode features a thought-out respawn feature, where players have to work with one another if they wish to ensure that the opposing force is thoroughly routed. Granted, it is possible to accomplish some objectives simply by gunning down enemies, but it’s rarely the most optimal solution. Firefight, for example, only allows for downed players to respawn if their teammates capture an objective, and this also ensures that players keep pushing against the opposition in a moderately uniform fashion by default.
Of course, SQUAD takes objective-focused gameplay to a whole different level, with the game playing parallel to the likes of ARMA most of the time. Matches take a very long time to unravel, even with a substantial number of players squaring off, and tactics is king. In Insurgency: Sandstorm, you can generally win by the seat-of-your-pants, simply running-and-gunning if the rest of your team complies with the objective. SQUAD caters to no such thing, offering instead a slow, deliberate, and highly-tactical experience. You might finish the match without firing your weapon once, even!
Of course, this is not a good fit for many players. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to have fun without worrying about tactics, team-play, or anything of the type, but if that’s what you’re looking for, tactical FPS titles are not what you should be playing. Not only will both Insurgency: Sandstorm and SQUAD ask of you to follow orders, comply with the rest of your team, and work with them toward a common goal, but they’ll also punish careless plays due to their realistic damage systems. In other words, one well-placed shot will usually take you down, and this unforgiving mantra is further established by offering only a limited number of respawns at best.
Not letting you come back into the game as soon as you get picked off plays well into these games’ core gameplay mechanics. When a game tells you that you can die fast when shot at, when your guns kick back hard, you don’t move like a rabbit on cocaine, and you can’t necessarily win simply by killing all the bad guys, that’s when it’s time to take a step back and slow things down. Slow is fast, as they say, and this is very much true in the tactical FPS niche.
Sound design is a massive boon here, too. For the most part, Insurgency: Sandstorm and SQUAD will both be quiet short of noise produced by players themselves, and with any given firefight winding down much faster and more abruptly than is the case in your generic FPS release, players quickly learn not only how to pick up on a more varied selection of audio cues, but also that engaging ASAP might not be the best course of action.
What does all of this tell us, then? Perhaps that hardcore tactical shooters are an entirely different animal from the regular, arcade-oriented ones. Though in varying degrees, both SQUAD and Insurgency: Sandstorm ask from players to engage with their teammates, discuss tactics, and play very, very carefully to come out on top. The main draw of these titles might then not necessarily be the casual negotiation of territory through gunfire, but rather the experience of slow and deliberate progress that’s peppered with occasional bursts of brutal violence.
This is a different sort of brutality than the usually ridiculous amount of blood and gore we get in video games, too. Though an average .50 round will absolutely destroy a human body in Insurgency: Sandstorm, what makes it particularly scary is that there’s no overt emphasis on the game’s violence at all. Instead, it just so happens that your fellow operator just lost an arm and a leg for leaving cover too early, and now there’s bone showing. An average hardcore FPS will definitely make you respect the tools of your trade, even when you don’t get to use them all that often.
All of this combines for a unique gaming experience: one that’s often terrifying and tense, and where careless plays will get you killed faster than you can say ‘bunny-hop’. Amazing stuff, really.
Get in the Game ! 
