The stress in the staccato crack of bullets hitting nearby, not quite hitting you but getting closer. The surge of adrenaline you get as an RPG whooshes by, slamming into a back wall and killing several teammates but leaving you alive... alone, to suffer. The palpable fear upon hearing the distinctive ring of a cell phone and not knowing where the bomb, or the bomber, could be. These are just a few things racing through your head in the middle of Insurgency: Sandstorm, a game that I only half-jokingly call a "PTSD simulator" for the experience it offers.

Set in the Middle East in either the modern era or a few years before it, Sandstorm pits local "Security Forces" (SecFor, or "SEC") against insurgents, managing to ground things in reality without making an overt political statement. Players must choose from a slew of classes offering a vast arsenal, kitting themselves out using a "point buy" system before hitting the field and putting the work in. One thing that's immediately tangible is how gameplay is both fast and deadly; A single bullet can often put you down, but the mobility of all but the most gear-laden soldiers enables quick and decisive assaults where one can take the foe by surprise and eliminate them. New to Sandstorm is fire support: Using the chain of command, a Commander can relay a fire support request to an Observer, allowing them to activate faction-specific support such as gun runs, suicide drones, chemical attacks, or the dreaded "Gunship on station!".

Not only is Sandstorm intense and fast, but due to audio design and other choices, it's incredibly immersive. Listening to things unfold honestly makes you feel the chaos of a live fire zone better than any game I've ever played. People shouting as gunfire rips through their cover, trying to keep things together if they've been hit or under duress (the infamous "triple F bomb"), and having back-and-forth banter does wonders to keep the player immersed. From the gameplay side of things, your gun "free aims" without a crosshair, and has laughable accuracy unless you take time to use your sights and control your bursts. There's a choice between "tactical" reloads (keeping the remainder of the magazine for later use) or faster "dry" ones, the amount of gun accessories borders on pornographic, and there is often an interesting dichotomy between agility and armor at work (though I would argue agility wins out slightly in many cases).

The major elephant in the room with this game is the optimization. I've played it from the tail end of the pre-order beta to a week or two back, and it still has problems running on specific maps, no matter my settings, despite me far exceeding the listed specs. To clarify: I do not mean "doesn't hit 60", I mean "the game turns into a PowerPoint slideshow". Things are a work in progress on that front, and I'm still hoping that it improves. Speaking of maps, the selection is somewhat scant at the moment, but this is also something that the developers have said they will work on adding. Rounding things out are a selection of bugs which sometimes make things annoying (I've had unwinnable rounds due to a supply cache deciding it wouldn't blow up no matter how much punishment it took, in addition to cosmetic issues like hand glitching), but overall, if you meet spec, and the optimization gets ironed out, the issues are not major.

Overall, this game reminds me a lot of the Rising Storm series, but obviously set in a more modern era. The focus is on smaller squad tactics, sure, but choosing to go all in on gameplay-friendly realism and catering to what Insurgency has always done well has only worked out in their favor, and has helped create what is probably the only non-horror game I can't play right before I go to sleep. And that's great.

The stress in the staccato crack of bullets hitting nearby, not quite hitting you but getting closer. The surge of adrenaline you get as an RPG whooshes by, slamming into a back wall and killing several teammates but leaving you alive... alone, to suffer. The [i]palpable fear[/i] upon hearing the distinctive ring of a cell phone and not knowing where the bomb, or the bomber, could be. These are just a few things racing through your head in the middle of Insurgency: Sandstorm, a game that I only half-jokingly call a "PTSD simulator" for the experience it offers. Set in the Middle East in either the modern era or a few years before it, Sandstorm pits local "Security Forces" (SecFor, or "SEC") against insurgents, managing to ground things in reality without making an overt political statement. Players must choose from a slew of classes offering a vast arsenal, kitting themselves out using a "point buy" system before hitting the field and putting the work in. One thing that's immediately tangible is how gameplay is both fast and deadly; A single bullet can often put you down, but the mobility of all but the most gear-laden soldiers enables quick and decisive assaults where one can take the foe by surprise and eliminate them. New to Sandstorm is fire support: Using the chain of command, a Commander can relay a fire support request to an Observer, allowing them to activate faction-specific support such as gun runs, suicide drones, chemical attacks, or the dreaded "Gunship on station!". Not only is Sandstorm intense and fast, but due to audio design and other choices, it's incredibly immersive. Listening to things unfold honestly makes you feel the chaos of a live fire zone better than any game I've ever played. People shouting as gunfire rips through their cover, trying to keep things together if they've been hit or under duress (the infamous "triple F bomb"), and having back-and-forth banter does wonders to keep the player immersed. From the gameplay side of things, your gun "free aims" without a crosshair, and has laughable accuracy unless you take time to use your sights and control your bursts. There's a choice between "tactical" reloads (keeping the remainder of the magazine for later use) or faster "dry" ones, the amount of gun accessories borders on pornographic, and there is often an interesting dichotomy between agility and armor at work (though I would argue agility wins out slightly in many cases). The major elephant in the room with this game is the optimization. I've played it from the tail end of the pre-order beta to a week or two back, and it [i]still[/i] has problems running on specific maps, no matter my settings, despite me far exceeding the listed specs. To clarify: I do not mean "doesn't hit 60", I mean "the game turns into a PowerPoint slideshow". Things are a work in progress on that front, and I'm still hoping that it improves. Speaking of maps, the selection is somewhat scant at the moment, but this is also something that the developers have said they will work on adding. Rounding things out are a selection of bugs which sometimes make things annoying (I've had unwinnable rounds due to a supply cache deciding it wouldn't blow up no matter how much punishment it took, in addition to cosmetic issues like hand glitching), but overall, if you meet spec, and the optimization gets ironed out, the issues are not major. Overall, this game reminds me a lot of the Rising Storm series, but obviously set in a more modern era. The focus is on smaller squad tactics, sure, but choosing to go all in on gameplay-friendly realism and catering to what Insurgency has always done well has only worked out in their favor, and has helped create what is probably the only non-horror game I can't play right before I go to sleep. And that's great.