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UPDATED REVIEW 2023:

Finally, insurgency sandstorm is what is was made to be. It took a long time, and a lot of work from NWI. But the stability, content, and resource usage has improved dramatically.

I recently came back to playing this game, and it's a blast. Don't get me wrong, I played 120 some hours of the game when I first gave it a negative review. It's always been fun, just frustrating to deal with all the problems that came with it.

I can comfortably say now that NWI at some point between that review and now has made good on the game's promise.

Below is the original review.

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I cannot in good conscience suggest people buy this game, as much as I would like to.

I played the Source Engine version of Insurgency for a long time. My friends and I would burn long hours late into the night playing mostly coop, and the occasional pvp match. New World Interactive knew how to make a game in source, and showed it well. That is not the case any more.

There are a few caveats, of course. Unreal is a new engine for NWI, and as such there will be some adaptation, delays, and bugs. I'm a software engineer myself, so those kinds of hurdles are completely reasonable in my mind. What isn't reasonable is the state and direction of a "released" game. While the original Insurgency did have some 4 years to build content, sadly the lack of content in Sandstorm will be the least of your worries. NWI has completely failed at preparing themselves to handle developing in a new engine.

Broken hit registry, unusable vehicle turrets, insane resource usage, and completely random crashes/bugs litter this game and make it basically unplayable in its current "released" state. While content is now slowly rolling out, most of it comes paired with updates so large and riddled with problems that you are unable to even enjoy said content. This game should not have left early access in the state that it's in, and somehow it's even worse now than when it was released from early access in terms of stability. NWI will repeat, over and over, that the QA process for releasing content is incredibly important. However, when those updates arrive, the bugs and crashes are so glaring that they would be found with literally any playtest, and leads me to believe they have done little to no testing before said update. Even their CTE, Community Test Environment, was kept up for only a few days then removed, only to fix near-0 of the bugs present in it before releasing the update.

The devs, NWI, also seem to have a massive disconnect from what kind of content keeps people playing a game. For most it's having a game that runs and operates as intended, which they have failed to deliver since post-1.1. Another would be adding game modes/content related to the games core values of mid-speed tactical gunplay, which they failed to deliver and instead gave us a literal april fools joke gamemode for killing zombies.

In summary, I have loved NWI for a long time. I've spent hundreds of hours in their previous games and loved doing so. But with Sandstorm, it's not the case. Between a constantly shifting development focus, releasing terrible meme-content like Frenzy mode, and the literal mountains of bugs and broken states of this game, Sandstorm is a no-go from me for now. I hope that changes, but with how dogmatic the community is in their defense of NWI, and how lost the devs are in the Unreal Engine, steer clear.


@JBlum Thank you for the response.

I want to reiterate that isn't an attack on you all personally, or to sow doubt that you are putting your love and hard work in every day. This is a review on the state of the game as a product and the path it's on, a review that can easily change as the game does. Like I said I've loved y'all and Insurgency for years now, the only reason I levy such criticism is because I hate to see my favorite shooter take turns for the worse.