Insurgency

One part counterstrike, one part frustration.

In this first person shooter you generally have to take and hold points, with little variation and a lot of shooting. It comes with good music, decent graphics and decent enough AI to enable full coop missions of 6-8 players, complete with in built voice chat which is pretty handy. I also quite like the notion of finding and destroying enemy caches to reduce their respawn numbers or make them weaker. You can also customize your load out a fair bit but what you can't do is ride any of the decorative vehicles in game - which is slightly annoying but forgivable.

It's important to note that this is a multiplayer game though, as only the training mission can be done solo. Furthermore, hosting requires a dedicated server so unless you have one lying around and know how to set it up, you and your buddies will have to share your gaming space with others. That's not really too bad though - this is one of those the more the merrier sort of deals.

 I wish we brought more dudes!

Where the game falls down a bit is in its respawn time. There is no life meter or HP in the game. Basically the more fire you take , even on the "forgiving" enemy AI level, the more likely you are to die. This is great if you are in cover but out in the open it usually means one shot insta-deaths. Because: Realism! (see here for a good argument as to why realism sucks :P)

I'm actually ok with that though. What's not OK is: "Your team will rapidly deploy once an objective is taken". Yep. Any dead players become spectators until the remaining team members can complete a task. The end result is a lot of waiting, for either that to happen or for everyone to die and have the map restart (which by default happens if you are trying to solo).

I suppose in the PvP mode (which I have no interest to try) this might work ala Counterstrike, but in coop you end up being idle for around half your game time. Why they didn't take the Battlefield series approach and just give a hard x seconds respawn timer, I don't know. Because of this severe flaw I can only give it two insurgents out of five and don't recommend it unless you are a die hard, realism FPS fan.