Incline Easy Red 2 - janky WW2 squad-based shooter with destructible environments

[udm]

Thanks to cw8 for telling me about this game. The best way to describe this is if Battlefield 1942 were to be created today by an Italian on a shoestring budget. Played it for about 6 hours yesterday and only stopped because I had some errands to run, but I have very few complaints about it.

To summarise the main features of the game, it's an FPS where you get to play as part of a squad. It can be played SP and MP; the AI is competent enough. There are vehicles to control. Planes are quite arcadey (no rolling, only banking and yawing with the mouse) but they're planning to make it more sim-like. Tanks are controlled by individual members, but you can control both the driver and gunner at the same time. Infantry combat is where the heart of the game is at.

Things that I like:
- The BF1942-style of gameplay without trudging 500m across the map to the hotzone. Squads spawn some distance from the contested area, but near enough that it takes less than a minute to get there.
- Inventory system. Not as robust as Tarkov or DayZ, but works well enough. A lot of time is spent frantically searching bodies for grenades and bandages.
- Janky ass movement that is part of the game's charm. Think BF1942 or Operation Flashpoint kind of slow. A Garand takes about 5-6 seconds to reload lmao.
- Because one or two shots take you down, you really have to rely on concealment. Smoke is king in this game.
- Destructible environments, baby! Nearly every structure can be destroyed. Not as nice as Bad Company or RF Guerrilla, but serviceable. Buildings are dangerous when arty is around.
- The squad system is nice. You really do want to try and make it through for as long as possible without dying. The AI is also decent: they'll heal, flank, loot bodies, smoke the area, etc.
- The game doesn't register your kills. Nobody gives a shit how good a shot you are, only whether or not your side wins.
- A couple of maps feature Germans fighting Italians . Also, this game has a lot of playable sides, including Poland.
- Flamethrowers actually work against vehicles, as they should IRL.
- Decent tank combat, helped by the fact that you can just bash through sandbags and trees.
- Built-in map editor. Haven't tried it but looks easy to use.
- The dev updates the game almost every week.

Things that I don't like:
- Plane controls. But good news is that they're working on it.
- Bullets don't penetrate surfaces. This is massive decline, but I think it's in the works.
- Some of the maps are unbalanced and a slog to play.
- The AI, while decent, has its retarded moments. If you are prone and they're 1m away from you, they take 4 seconds to identify you .
- Some of the voiceovers are painfully bad.

Oh yeah this game is mostly made by 1 dude (hence why I said "made by an Italian"). Great game overall, especially for that price.

 

[jebsmoker]

i like this game a lot. it's basically low-rent operation flashpoint/arma but set during ww2, and it reminds me of looking at the value-priced pc games at walmart in the best way possible - it has the same energy as those weird budget shooters you'd see there

 

[Curratum]

Bought on launch in January, played for an hour, refunded.

Everything, is janky. Movement, scoping, going over terrain, animations, it just feels so bad. It's basically "baby's first overambitious attempt at Battlefield, but I'm a solo dev and I am primarily a programmer".

Bits from my Steam review: "From walking and movement over anything that's not flat land, to clipping into everything, to weapon animations, to MS Paint menus, to first person camera issues and view model angles and FOV, to bizarre voice acting, to gunfire sounds, to needing to press Shift to get any sort of FOV reduction / zoom like you're used to in almost every other shooter when you aim down sights, to bots either sniping you through foliage or passing you by in melee range, a lot of buildings feeling off-scale to the player model proportions..."

If you must play some WW2 shooter with super-large scale maps and battles, just get Enlisted, it's free to play and almost completely free from microtransaction / pay2win garbage. You can rock people's pants off with all starting squads and armies, the graphics are great for the low sys reqs and you get several different fronts and armies.