UPDATED REVIEW 2023:

Finally, insurgency sandstorm is what is was made to be. It took a long time, and a lot of work from NWI. But the stability, content, and resource usage has improved dramatically.

I recently came back to playing this game, and it's a blast. Don't get me wrong, I played 120 some hours of the game when I first gave it a negative review. It's always been fun, just frustrating to deal with all the problems that came with it.

I can comfortably say now that NWI at some point between that review and now has made good on the game's promise.

Below is the original review.

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I cannot in good conscience suggest people buy this game, as much as I would like to.

I played the Source Engine version of Insurgency for a long time. My friends and I would burn long hours late into the night playing mostly coop, and the occasional pvp match. New World Interactive knew how to make a game in source, and showed it well. That is not the case any more.

There are a few caveats, of course. Unreal is a new engine for NWI, and as such there will be some adaptation, delays, and bugs. I'm a software engineer myself, so those kinds of hurdles are completely reasonable in my mind. What isn't reasonable is the state and direction of a "released" game. While the original Insurgency did have some 4 years to build content, sadly the lack of content in Sandstorm will be the least of your worries. NWI has completely failed at preparing themselves to handle developing in a new engine.

Broken hit registry, unusable vehicle turrets, insane resource usage, and completely random crashes/bugs litter this game and make it basically unplayable in its current "released" state. While content is now slowly rolling out, most of it comes paired with updates so large and riddled with problems that you are unable to even enjoy said content. This game should not have left early access in the state that it's in, and somehow it's even worse now than when it was released from early access in terms of stability. NWI will repeat, over and over, that the QA process for releasing content is incredibly important. However, when those updates arrive, the bugs and crashes are so glaring that they would be found with literally any playtest, and leads me to believe they have done little to no testing before said update. Even their CTE, Community Test Environment, was kept up for only a few days then removed, only to fix near-0 of the bugs present in it before releasing the update.

The devs, NWI, also seem to have a massive disconnect from what kind of content keeps people playing a game. For most it's having a game that runs and operates as intended, which they have failed to deliver since post-1.1. Another would be adding game modes/content related to the games core values of mid-speed tactical gunplay, which they failed to deliver and instead gave us a literal april fools joke gamemode for killing zombies.

In summary, I have loved NWI for a long time. I've spent hundreds of hours in their previous games and loved doing so. But with Sandstorm, it's not the case. Between a constantly shifting development focus, releasing terrible meme-content like Frenzy mode, and the literal mountains of bugs and broken states of this game, Sandstorm is a no-go from me for now. I hope that changes, but with how dogmatic the community is in their defense of NWI, and how lost the devs are in the Unreal Engine, steer clear.


@JBlum Thank you for the response.

I want to reiterate that isn't an attack on you all personally, or to sow doubt that you are putting your love and hard work in every day. This is a review on the state of the game as a product and the path it's on, a review that can easily change as the game does. Like I said I've loved y'all and Insurgency for years now, the only reason I levy such criticism is because I hate to see my favorite shooter take turns for the worse.

I'm glad that this is accepted, and moving forward as experience. I think Early Access, especially for a company like NWI, can be an invaluable tool if used wisely. Especially in the case with Unreal being a new engine to work in, Early Access would've allowed you to work out the kinks while getting people interested, so long as it's not marketed as finished.

These aren't inherently bad. The problem I have with Frenzy is not that it's an arcade mode or that it's not fun. I think it is fun. The problem I have with Frenzy is that it takes development cycles to work on content like that, while there's boatloads of other parts of the game that need much more dire attention. Insurgency targets that sweet spot of middle-market medium speed tactical shooter. This early in the fleshing out of Sandstorm shouldn't be spent on tangent game modes while the core of the game is lacking so much in stability and diversity. Not to mention it was "announced" on April 1 while people were hurting most for new game modes and core content.

Imagine Call of duty releasing their game with the Nazi Zombies addon but not having a playable online multiplayer, yet still marketing themselves as THE multiplayer shooter. Sure Frenzy is fun, but there's plenty of other zombie games to go play. There's no other games that can fill the hole that Insurgency usually fills for its core gameplay. Frenzy should benefit from the interest of players in the core gameplay of insurgency, not the other way around.

As I've said before, the hundreds of hours in both insurgency games have informed a lot of what I think about Sandstorm's direction. If Sandstorm gets back on track and delivers a simple base level of core-oriented content with fixes for game stability I see no reason not to return to play more and revisit my statements to reflect it.

Kudos for taking the time to respond to a negative review that isn't finger-wagging. That's a good sign in and of itself. Thanks again.