keeping you from ignoring your team
and playing it like a lone wolf. But
without backup, a lone rifleman is
helpless against vehicles, can’t build a
new spawn point, and can’t even heal
their own wounds. Everything worth
doing in Squad takes a group effort. A
single sharpshooter doesn’t make
much of impact when the game is
truly decided by reviving teammates
and choosing when to attack/defend.
So many shooters build their
experiences around opportunities to
be a hero. I never feel like one in
Squad, but I do feel something better:
Pride for what we accomplished as a
unit. Victory would have been
impossible if our squad leader hadn’t
led, our mortars weren’t accurate,
and I hadn’t patched up our wounds.
As I look at the post-match
scoreboard, I see the rest of our team,
and wonder about the stories they
could tell from their perspectives. A
ruthless hour of fighting over a city
block for me might’ve been another
squad’s stealth mission hunting down
enemy FOBs miles away. Squad
understands what a battle really feels
like. It’s messy, loud, and full of
uncertainty. The best you can do is
listen to your leader, and hope they’re
steering toward steady waters.
REALITY CHECK
Squad stands out as the FPS doing
the most to reward coordination and
RIGHT: When there’s
no transport truck
available, sometimes
you have to hoof it to
your objective.teamwork on a massive scale, but
many of its concepts and mechanics
come from the Battlefield 2 mod that
preceded it: Project Reality.
Released in 2005 only a month
after BF2’s launch, Project Reality
attracted a niche audience looking
for the emphasis on strategy they
couldn’t find elsewhere.
That audience also included
those actively serving in the military,ORDERLY COMMS
Silence isn’t golden anymoreCommunication is a
fundamental pillar of Squad,
and that’s best exemplified by
its excellent voice comms. The
audio quality is crystal clear, so
there’s no need to gather
separately in Discord. In fact,
that’d be doing the game is a
disservice, as it adds on subtleaudio effects to distinguish
between chatter heard over
your in-game radio (like orders
from your squad leader) and
local chat spoken by soldiers in
your vicinity. Voices are spatially
relevant, so a medic can listen
to a soldier’s cries for healing to
determine their location.“THAT’S WHERE I THINK THE
MILITARY SIDE REALLY
STARTED COMING INTO PLAY”