Perhaps my favorite milsim game of all time.
There are a lot of things that I think this game does well which are probably worth an extremely long essay, but I'll try to stick to the main points.
The game is a sequel to the Red Orchestra game series and more specifically the Rising Storm Pacific expansion for Red Orchestra 2. As such, the gameplay revolves around fighting over control points (in various gamemode formats) with a limited ticket respawn system that both sides have to be conscious of. The gunplay is quite realistic, so typically a bullet or two from an assault rifle will kill you instantly depending on where you were hit. This often means that a good amount of the gameplay is hiding in foliage or cover trying to pick off enemies at a long distance.
What makes this game different from other milsim games and even the preceding Red Orchestra games to an extent, is its pacing. Unlike Arma, Squad, or other large scale milsim games, there is /a lot/ less "downtime". In otherwords, you spend more time actually fighting rather than being in transport to the fight or doing miscellaneous activities those games are known for. An exception to this is being transported via helicopter, but even this is /usually/ optional (there's one map that is an exception to this).
That also means that the map sizes are more "digestible". In a game like Squad, you can get picked off by a sniper a bagillion miles away and it's like finding a needle in a haystack to deal with them. In RS2, the maps are large enough that a sense of scale can be felt but small enough that long ranged camping is easier to triangulate and deal with. That's not mention that the best way to win a match due to time limits is to contest the objective rather than camp some place faraway.
One of my most cherished parts of this game is its ability to immerse. The most popular gamemode is "Campaign". Essentially both teams, North and South Vietnam, are fighting over territorial control of South Vietnamese provinces/regions on a large map of the whole country. Both teams have a finite amount of Combat Power that they gain every turn depending on what territories they control. Starting in 1965, whoever pushes the other team into negative combat power or ends in 1975 with the most combat power wins. Certain equipment or even armies are limited depending on the year. For example, only M14s are available to American forces in the early war years. American and Australian forces are unavailable after (roughly) 1973 in accordance with their historical withdrawal.
With those things in mind along with the careful attention to historical detail with the weapons and maps, it genuinely makes you feel like you are fighting a war where there is something at stake. Most other milsims will gladly throw you into a match with two armies that have never fought each other in real life on a map/location that they've never set foot in or is fictional outright. To me, that lessens the incentive to invest in playing match after match and RS2 seems to be the only exception to that.
Finally, there genuinely seems to be some sense of strategy and teamwork required for winning a match. One person per team can take the role of the "Commander". This is essentially a role that allows you to call in cooldown based map call-ins to try and even the odds. These include air support, artillery strikes, reconnaissance, and reduced or instant force respawns. Timing, game sense, and even trying to predict the enemy commander are pivotal. This increases the intensity of fights significantly and has led to a lot of nail bitter overtimes that I remember fondly.
I'll provide one anecdote to end this.
There was one instance while fighting as the US, that we were up against a level 100 veteran commander that had been steamrolling us in previous fights. A newbie commander took the slot on our team. Rather than try and votekick him out of the role, I decided to play a squad leader and mark coordinates for airstrikes. As we are pushed back to a critical hill chokepoint, I desperately throw a purple smoke grenade over the hill to manually mark coordinates.
The enemy commander performs an "Ambush", a North Vietnam unique commander ability that spawns the entire team on the commander. The enemy team swarms the hill like ants and push their capture progress up to around 90%. Then, I see a lone jet fighter flying in from the distance. In what might as well be slow motion, two napalm cannisters drop onto the other side of the hill. A chorus of Asiatic screams are heard and the kill feed goes wild as the enemy capture progress suddenly begins to collapse back down to zero. It was like getting a front row seat to Waterloo collapsing for Napoleon in real time. "Whoever dropped those coordinates deserves a medal." says our team commander. Absolute cinema.
Even if you aren't a fan of milsims, I would at least give this game a try when it goes on sale. The player base is unfortunately dwindling overtime after ten years, but players are still active during prime time. Give it a try before it's gone.
