The Gold Standard For World War 2 First-Person Shooters and a Return to the Roots of Battlefield 1942
- Genre: First-Person Shooter (FPS) | Historical Shooter | Indie Shooter
- Developer: Marco Amadei
- Publisher: Corvostudio di Amadei Marco
- Price: $8.99 | 8,99€ | £7.99
- Release Date: 10 November , 2020
- Reviewer: Chris Irwin (PC)
That’s a big statement, I know. Easy Red 2 came out in 2020. Why would someone, 5 years later, write this review just after Battlefield 6 released and promised a return to the Battlefield roots, going head to head with Call of Duty for the coveted, and huge, FPS playerbase?
Why would I say this when more realistic milsims like Hell Let Loose have already captured the hardcore WW2 milsim audience, and with games like Enlisted making a very compelling case for those who don’t mind playing alongside bots.
Well, who am I?
I’m a 42-year-old Army veteran of the Iraq War. I love playing hardcore simulators from Arma 3 to Wargame Design Studio WW2 games.
I’m a big military history reader. To name some of the books I read: I read 3 biographies of George Patton, To Hell and Back by Audie Murphy, Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shirer, Tank Warfare on the Eastern Front 1941-1942 by Robert Forczyk, and so many more. I could list you hundreds more, but I want to point out that I’m a massive military history fan, and to contextualize you where my opinions are coming from, because you’re about to read some bold and wild statements, and since Battlefield 5 notorious messing up of its portrayal of the Second World War, I’m not the kind of guy that takes source material disrespect lightly. With that being said, let’s jump right into the review!
As an older gamer, I do not like Fortnite or extraction shooters. I don’t like games that cater to Twitch streamers, and passionately dislike games that nickel and dime players with microtransactions.
Easy Red 2 throws all that out the door. Easy Red 2 base game has 5 campaigns, some of which have up to 15 missions. Each mission plays exactly like a Battlefield map, but I would even say, with a larger scale than what we saw in Battlefield 1942 and Battlefield: Vietnam. I would love to give you some Battlefield 6 comparisons, too, but I haven’t played it yet. But at least I can tell you the maps are bigger and better than Battlefield 5! But I have been reading online about people who wanted to play a combined arms game on a huge map, but apparently, only 3 of those meet that criteria. Fortunately, for those of you who are looking for this exact experience, Easy Red 2 has over 100 large maps from its base game without DLC, and also has more on the Steam Workshop you can play. This means those who are unhappy only having 3 large maps on Battlefield 6 can play an almost endless amount of large combined arms maps for a fraction of the price.
Let me go on another tangent here. I recently played Battlefield 2042 and the new Delta Force game, and one thing I disliked was those damn, stupid operators (that just exist to sell you even more of them). Well, in Easy Red 2, there’s nothing of the sort; you play a regular nobody, caught up in the war, with a random name, such as my Huang Shui, a man born in 1916 who perished in 1937 in Shanghai. Oh yes, maybe I forgot to tell you, Easy Red 2 has so much content that it even features a Chinese DLC era campaign.
I have already told you how I dislike these “new” microtransactions strategies, but I’m opposed to games having DLC, with Easy Red 2 being a great example of DLC being done the right way: the base game is packed with tons of content, and the developers have been making amazing DLCs chock full of amazing new campaigns and maps, containing hundreds of hours of fun, and going for less than a price of a couple of operators in some of those games above.
Now, about the game’s multiplayer and single-player aspects! You already know that I’m old, and I don’t have reflexes like I did in my 20s. I don’t care about competition; I like to play a few missions with a handful of friends against an army of bots or my friends’ army of bots. And the bots in this game are good on the hard setting; in fact, sometimes my friends and I actually get wiped out by the bots. These bots are not perfect, but when I remember the bots from the 90s, these are actually pretty decent. The ones from yesteryear would just tidal wave in your defenses. At least these try to flank you. For me, I haven’t had this much fun playing a map like this filled with bots since Xbox 360’s Battlefield Bad Company 2 Onslaught DLC, which was an Xbox exclusive, not on PC. The bots were brutal and made the multiplayer level feel like a whole new game. Just based on this alone, I think that Easy Red 2 is a much more accessible game, giving you more options to play how you want to, and you don’t even need any internet access to do it if you don’t want to play online.
And I know some people feel it’s a sin to like bots and think I’m a casual noob gamer cause I’m not competing with the big boys. That’s fine, I don’t play games to be in some competitive ranking system, but just to have fun with a few friends. And a lot of these competitive games are filled with cheaters who just go into the games to try and noob-farm. I’m there to have fun, so for me and for many others, it’s not fun being farmed, believe it or not. Being in that space is not the reason why I play games. Some of us older guys just want to have fun for a few hours and not commit to years-long gaming matches. I got over 3000 games on Steam alone. I like to devote time to other games too.
Now, let’s talk about why offline single-player support is important for me. I bought games like Beyond the Wire that, unless you’re going to the Steam foruns to try and figure out if the game has any bots (it has, but it’s not clear, at all it does), then the thing you just bought becomes a completely dead game. These games need hype to even be playable, and once the hype is gone and the server shuts down, the game is just a virtual dustbin.
Another issue I have with always-online video games is ping. I used to play Hell Let Loose when I lived in Texas, and since I lived in a small town, they didn’t offer fast service, so I couldn’t play the game properly. Even years later, I visited the country of Laos, and it had faster internet there than in my small town in Texas. Now I live in Thailand and I bought the fastest internet here. Faster than any internet I had in the United States, but I can’t play the game cause they don’t have a player base in Asia, and I’ll just get booted off the US and European servers cause I won’t have high enough ping for the admins.
Now, if I bring this issue up on any forum, I’ll just get laughed at for not living in a US city or a European country. That, for some reason, wanting some offline bot support would take away from their experience. Blackmill WW1 games have a decent multiplayer game with bots. Not sure how someone like me is not allowed to enjoy the game, and people think that by adding bots, it will take away from the resources of an already existing multiplayer game. In my opinion, not including bots is by design, and not because of a lack of resources. If Easy Red 2, a more budgeted version of a World War 2 shooter, can do it, why can’t everyone else? We used to have that everywhere during the 90s and early 2000s.
I mean, don’t you want to experience a game you enjoyed 25 years ago, today? Well, if the game doesn’t have bots and lacks an active multiplayer scene, you won’t. Or you will, but you’ll be just playing alone, on empty servers. Not quite the experience you had way back when. Case in point: I still play a modded version of Battlefield 1942.
Now, with my rant about bots out of the way, let’s talk a bit about the game’s mechanics, shall we?
Gameplay-wise, the game is clearly leaning more on the arcade-y side, of course, as you can run as much as you would like and not get tired, but there are no crazier things like bunny-hopping, sliding, and all that. It’s not a sim, but it’s also not Unreal Tournament. As for the tank controls, they play pretty much the same as Battlefield games, and the aircraft ones also do a decent job of being easy to handle and getting a grip as well. Aiming feels right, too. Essentially, what I’m trying to say is that the game takes what I enjoy from other games and spits out the boring mechanics, such as being out of breath after running for 20 seconds, or some of the stiffness of the movement, typical of games like ARMA and Red Orchestra 2, where units often feel heavy.
You play as a platoon with set roles and can choose between what the platoon offers. Whether it’s an infantry platoon, a tank platoon, or an aircraft platoon. Each nation speaks the language of the nation, too, for added immersion. Whether Russian, German, Japanese, Chinese, or American, there are voicelines for all. Really cool and neat touch.
Despite how much I enjoy Easy Red 2, it isn’t without its negatives, so let’s talk a bit about them.
The game might have bots, and while they’re decent at high difficulties, the game’s AI can be janky on lower settings. Graphics can be dated for some players who want it to look like Hell Let Loose, but for $8.99, I’d rather they focus on more content than flashier graphics. Using a controller can feel a bit off as well.
I think that Easy Red 2 is the kind of game that I would highly recommend to players who enjoy both the more recent Battlefield iterations, as well as games like Red Orchestra 2, Hell Let Loose, ARMA, and Post Scriptum (Squad 44). It’s a blend of combined arms, with plenty of scope and scale, but it doesn’t play as slow as those other games. The game isn’t hardcore, but it’s also not too arcade-like. It positions itself in the middle ground between action-packed FPS and more hardcore milsim options. Don’t get me wrong, I also love my ARMA experiences, but the truth is that I’m just not always in the mood for that, and when I just want to have a fun FPS session, Easy Red 2 is my go-to game. It’s a perfect blend of authenticity and arcade fun.
For those of you who are more into strategy and wargames, let me make this comparison: Sometimes I want to play Combat Mission for slow-paced, detailed realism, and at times I want to play Steel Division for some elements of realism at a faster pace. Just the perfect cocktail for my war gaming experience, and I know I’ll be able to play it 20 more years down the road. If you’re looking for a more traditional FPS experience, reminiscent of those we had in the late 90s and early 2000s, where plenty of content, offline modes, bots, and arcade fun were king, and we had none of this extraction shooter sweat-fest nonsense, I would highly recommend you pick up Easy Red 2 and join my ranks!
In my book, Easy Red 2 is a 10 out of 10 game.
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