GDC: Death is Quick in Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad

As anyone who played the original Red Orchestra will tell you, this is not a simple first-person shooter. The sequel, the World War II-themed Heroes of Stalingrad will be no different. Get hit by a bullet in a critical part of your body and you're dead. Get tagged in an extremity and you'll start to bleed out and have a chance to bandage, but it's still entirely possible for the screen to fade to black just before you keel over for good. It's a style of gameplay where blindly charging into combat is about as good an idea as taking a nap in a deep fryer.

Thankfully Heroes of Stalingrad has a few mechanics built in to help you stay alive. There's a first-person cover system that lets you shuffle up close to structures then quickly pop up to fire off a few shots. In a nice touch, the cover mechanic doesn't lock you to pieces of the environment in a restrictive way, so it's easy to back off and move around again if you need to change locations. While in cover it's also possible to blind fire at enemies. This doesn't mean you're slightly less accurate with your weapon as you shoot over the top of cover, it's a true blind fire system – you can't actually see where you're shooting because of the first-person perspective. It could be useful in corridors and enclosed spaces, but out in the open blind fire probably isn't a good idea.

While on the battlefield, if you're functioning as the squad leader it's possible to order around assault and machine gun squads to different positions and to attack enemies. If you interact with a radio on a map, you'll also be able to call up a map to order in artillery strikes, surveillance aircraft and rocket barrages. The surveillance plane identifies targets on a map through line of sight, so it is possible for the other team to hide from it, as well as shoot it down. When the other team is spotted, a follow-up with artillery can blow them or pulverize the structures in which they're hiding. Buildings in Heroes of Stalingrad are destructible, and while you can't level them entirely, you can reduce walls and roofs to puffs of splinters and debris.
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