Insurgency: Sandstorm

« Insurgency: Sandstorm isn’t the prettiest shooter of 2018, but the places where it excels are the places that matter most. Its gunplay is superb, its arsenal is exemplary, and the maps and modes are serviceable enough to facilitate its memorably frantic and immersive FPS combat. »

« Insurgency: Sandstorm is one of the most surprising games of this generation. With amazing sound design, solid gunplay and original ideas, it has become the perfect game for FPS gamers. »

« Somehow in this most well-travelled of multiplayer FPS paths, Insurgency: Sandstorm feels fresh and innovative at every turn. »

« If you are looking for an online multiplayer shooter that is much more realistic than Call of Duty or Battlefield, but is not pain-in-the-ass realistic like Arma series, then Insurgency: Sandstorm is your choice; and with the promise of constant support and free DLCs from the developers, I expect that Insurgency will soon become a big player in this genre. »

« Insurgency: Sandstorm’s slower, more realistic approach likely won’t win over any Call of Duty fans, but then again it’s not really trying to. Sandstorm was made with a very specific type of player in mind, and if you fit that mold you’ll likely get dozens if not hundreds of hours out of the game. And even if you don’t fit that mold completely, there are enough ancillary incentives to make Sandstorm an excellent pick-up-and-play game, especially if you have some friends to recruit. »

« A tense as well as challenging online shooter that manages to strike a balance between simulation and fast paced action. »

« Insurgency: Sandstorm is a convincing online FPS. It's not for everyone, but the hardcore gamers will find a satisfying tactical shooter where a good coordination with the team members is vital for success. »

« It needs more content, but apart from that, we can’t really say anything bad about this demanding, challenging, realistic and satisfying experience. »

« This is for PC and PS4. I don’t know why I even bothered trying to play this again, it’s February of 2026 and the game remains practically unplayable. The Ai is fundamentally broken on multiple levels, to the point of absurdity. If the developers actually took reviews seriously and made changes, the game COULD be one of the best shooters out there. However I don’t think they care anymore, and at present the player base is very small probably because of bad gameplay is, the servers are hanging on by a thread, and the software engineers and developers have given up on making any improvements. These are the issues that I and many others believe make the game practically unplayable. 1. Enemy Ai, somehow the Enemy Ai can head-shot me with a pistol from 200 yards away.. ok... I also love how when I deploy a smoke grenade, I myself can’t see a single thing, but somehow the enemy can see me clearly even at night without NVGs through smoke.. 2. Friendly Ai is completely broken, when I visit my friend his internet connection usually gets interrupted and so we just play against the enemy Ai. And friendly Ai are broken. They’re useless, they can't shoot, they can't clear a room, they move in front of me when I’m engaging an enemy, they deploy smoke blocking my view unless you happen to be the enemy Ai with superpowers, or sometimes they’ll just hang out in doorways staring at the floor. 3. Enemy Ai with X-Ray vision and super powers, the enemy Ai is broken as well, to almost laughable levels. They can see me at night through smoke without NVGs, shoot me through walls from outside a building, hit me from 200yds away with a pistol and the list goes on. 4. The game modes and their functions, I'm not sure who thought up how these game modes should work, but here is basically what I and a room full of people have experienced. So we’ll begin a game with an Ai support team, against an Ai enemy element. I’ll go to objective (A) I'll capture objective (A), my entire team will get killed by the enemy Ai because my Ai team is worthless and the enemy Ai are all super human, and I and anyone else who is playing will essentially just be left fighting off 3-4 waves of enemies entirely alone with no support. 5. Ai Adjustments, there are none. On PS4, my Ai team and the enemy Ai bots can't be adjusted at all. I can't adjust the number of bots, the number of waves, the difficulty level, nothing. 6. Aiming Controls and Adjustments, the aiming in the game is abysmal, it's absolutely horrible. I’ve played lots of shooters and I mean a lot, and no game comes close to having aiming mechanics as awful as Insurgency Sandstorm, not even close. There is almost no happy medium, it's either too fast or too slow, or does funny things when you try to adjust them. Also the adjustments for aiming are labeled in such a way that make it almost impossible to achieve the aiming parameters you want, it’s not intuitive AT ALL. It could be labeled (left to right speed) or (play in joysticks when aiming). Instead it says something like (Aim Dampening) or (Ease out Aim Dampening), huh? And if by some miracle you're able to actually adjust them how you want, the moment you change your weapon, all your fine tuning goes out the window. 7. Game Modes, as far as I can see if I'm not able to connect online for some reason or just want to practice, I can only play check point as an insurgent or checkpoint as security in either regular or hardcore, and that’s it. I remember years ago in the original I could play any map I wanted in all sorts of modes, I could even play by myself and explore a map or play against 2 or even just 1 enemy bot. I could play against zombies. 8. Connection & Lag, this can be caused by lots of things but I’ll just say that unless you have an excellent internet connection the moment you run into 4 or more enemies at once, the game will lag and enemy Ai will headshot you. 9. Slowest reloading and aiming I’ve ever encountered in a game. Seriously my little 12 year old niece can reload faster in real life than the characters do in this game. What a joke. TLDR/ Summary - The Ai is fundamentally broken and they’re not gonna fix it, the aiming mechanics are abysmal and any attempt at finding a happy medium or simply making sense of the adjustment parameters is a waste of time, the game modes make no sense in how they work and are all timed for some unknown purpose ruining the gameplay, and any hopes of fine tuning the Ai difficulty or game modes is also hopeless. Smoke grenades do nothing even if used at night as the enemy Ai has xray vision and you don’t, night modes are in essence pointless because the enemy Ai can spot you even though you have NVGs and they don’t. Personally, I feel the game is practically unplayable and thus not worth playing. I was given the game for free and still don’t find it worth playing. »

« Hopeless Call of Duty clone. In terms of visuals and sound design, it's very immersive. But it's gameplay is far closer to Advanced Warfare than to Arma or Squad. Expect fast-paced, run and gun action with rapid ADS, twitch reflexes, slide-stops and advanced movement tech. Ultimately the gameplay is a betrayal of the promise of the aesthetic. You think you're going to get a grounded, immersive shooter. But instead you get a game that *looks* like that, but plays like the lesser cod games of the last 10 years. Derivative, uncreative, poorly executed. »

« The game is difficult and very choppy, the frame rate is terrible on PS4, and the weapon-switching controls are strange. »

« The best tactical shooter with incredible sounds and immersive gameplay. Appreciate the game while it exists, as such masterpieces are no longer being made »

« Jugué la primera entrega de Insurgency y me encantó por completo. Sus modos de juego, el ritmo, ese equilibrio entre arcade y realismo me parecieron una experiencia única dentro de los shooters en primera persona. Insurgency: Sandstorm mantiene ese mismo espíritu, pero elevando todo a otro nivel. Gráficamente es muy superior, el sonido es espectacular cada disparo, cada explosión se sienten intensamente reales y la jugabilidad sigue siendo su punto más fuerte.Este no es un shooter para cualquiera. Tiene un enfoque más táctico y realista que Call of Duty, pero no llega a los extremos de simulación de Arma, quedando justo en ese punto medio que lo hace tan especial. Su gunplay es excelente, el arsenal está muy bien trabajado, y los mapas y modos están diseñados para ofrecer combates intensos, inmersivos y llenos de tensión. Si encajas con este estilo de juego, es muy probable que te quedes por decenas o incluso cientos de horas. Y aunque no seas ese jugador “ideal”, Sandstorm sigue ofreciendo razones de sobra para jugarlo, sobre todo si tienes amigos con quienes compartir la **** definitiva, lo recomiendo sin dudar por su jugabilidad, por el realismo bien medido, por sus gráficos mejorados y por su sonido impresionante. Un multijugador diferente que merece más atención de la que tiene. »

« Just like my favorite game of all time L4D2 this game is extremely replayable the community might be toxic to certain people Yes i can see that but I LOVE them I interact with some of the same people here and there and they give me a good laugh. The game gets updates pretty frequently for things like cosmetics, maps, double xp (for account level) it doesn't let the game hang out to dry like what Rockstar games did to Red Dead Redemption 2 MP. The reason i put it as a 9/10 instead of a 10/10 is phasing issues when i shoot someone sometimes the bullet goes through them and hits behind them and there's a weird bug recently I've recently got in the pass few days of ground texture being black but it stops when the game is done, none the less if i had 30 bucks and trying to get an fps that will last me a long time, if im looking for a game that isn't COD, Rainbow 6, and im not looking for a game like ready or not/arma/squad, THIS IS THE GAME!!! »

« A perfect blend of gritty realism with nice arcadey elements that make for a wonderful serious game, and a wonderful 'lets **** around' game at the same time. »

« Absolutely do not recommend this game. Because it has two useless classes - the Observer, who is always running wherever and does not fulfill his functions and the Commander, who can do nothing because he is FULLY dependent on the Observer, who is running wherever! »