The enemy AI is every bit as stupid, which is the only reason your army isn’t annihilated within the first couple of minutes. You comrades in arms bumble around running into walls and each other, and every now and then manage to shoot an enemy. It’s very much like a Saturday night at Walmart: you’re convinced that you are the only sane person in the place. It is at this point it becomes painfully obvious that the single-player mode is intended to be nothing more than a training ground for the multi-player. Unfortunately the player is soon turned loose to fight the Russians for control of Stalingrad. At this point, things are looking pretty promising. The weapons and firing motions are well detailed and the voice narration has an authentic German accent. For example, the player not only learns how to fire a rifle from a few different stances, but how to adjust the gun sights to compensate for bullet drop over longer distances. It starts out well enough with a fairly standard tutorial wherein the player learns how to operate a handful of standard German army infantry weapons, but at a level of detail somewhat higher than previous games in the genre. This becomes readily apparent very early in the single-player campaign mode. In the case of Red Orchestra, Tripwire appears to be taking aim at the ultra-realistic multi-player segment.

Still, even within a crowded market there is usually some niche that has been under-served. here comes one more entry into a very crowded market. Just when you thought it was safe to say that the WWII genre had run its course. This revelation will come from the recently released Tripwire FPS, Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad. It appeared for awhile that there may have been some form of more modern warfare, but in mid-2011 the WWII genre made another reappearance. His inarguable conclusion will be that the only war ever fought was from 1939 to 1945. Someday in the distant future, a doctoral student in anthropology will write a thesis on the topic of war on the planet Earth based on the only research materials still available: the National Archive of Video Games.

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