Released sometime in the last few weeks, Insurgency: Modern Infantry Combat is a new half-life 2 mod.
I haven’t had a chance to play it much yet, but so far I’m liking it a lot. It has a heavy focus on realism - the first time I fired up the game and the tip of the day type message was “reloading with an empty chamber takes longer” I knew I’d probably love the game - few, if any, games actually seem to model that. America’s Army was the most ridiculous, when supposedly realistic, you’d go through the whole SPORTS drill to reload a weapon with a hot chamber.
It’s a very good looking game. There’s a lot of detail put into the maps - and it has the feel of a war torn Iraq I’ve seen from news footage. A lot of care was taken in designing the maps to put a lot of cover in, but not to just have random crates stacked everywhere - the environments flow very naturally. It does seem to have a yellow/green filter that tints all of the graphics so that they’re excessively strongly colored in that barren desert kind of way.
The realism, thus far, is very good. There are no crosshairs, no bunny hopping. It’s a lot like red orchestra - which is mostly good. You use iron sights (or optics), and they even sway and become misaligned as you move around - which is better than how red orchestra has it, where your sights stay perfectly aligned but you move painfully slowly. There are no magically refilling magazines like in counterstrike, although it lacks RO’s “magazine is light” type messages.
It feels generally very realistic - the movement is at a natural pace, aiming is fairly intuitive and realistic - the one major complaint I have is that weapons seem too light on the recoil and easy to control. Most games are the opposite - the recoil is exaggerated I guess to make sure you know they spent time putting a recoil system in - but this one is understated - you could rapid fire a .308 L1A1 without much muzzle climb, for example.
Combat is very fast and lethal, though. Most of the time you don’t even know what hits you, you just black out and go dead on the first hit. Realistic, and brutal, but so far somewhat frustrating.
Kills aren’t confirmed - kills and deaths aren’t even kept track of (except I guess for the permanent stat system that they’re working on) - but you don’t even know you’ve killed someone unless you see their corpse.
Generally, it seems very promising, although I’ll refine my opinion when I’ve had a chance to deal with every weapon system and get more used to the maps - as it is, you don’t know if that patio in one spot is atmospheric background terrain where no one can get to it, or if you should expect someone to pop up and shoot you from it - or how to go from checkpoint to checkpoint, etc. It has a few different game modes that involve different objectives, but I haven’t played long enough to get a feel for it.