RUNNING WITH RIFLES

I went in expecting a casual arcade shooter and got my teeth kicked in for the first twenty minutes. That early friction is not a bug in Running With Rifles, it is the entire design philosophy. You start at the bottom of the rank ladder, carrying whatever basic assault rifle you can afford with your meager resource points, and the battlefield around you operates completely regardless of your existence. Hundreds of AI soldiers push zones, flank, suppress, and pile up in doorways without waiting for you to feel ready. Most top-down shooters make you the hero by default. This one makes you earn it. The core loop is zone capture across large open maps, but the tools you build toward are what make it interesting. Rank up from Private and you eventually unlock squad command, letting you lead a small group of soldiers you can order into positions, use as ablative cover, or send to flank while you lay down fire from a machine gun emplacement. Higher ranks open radio calls: artillery barrages, paratrooper drops, even tank airlifts if you have the resource points to spend. The three base factions each carry their own weapon families, with Greencoats running M16s and Browncoats fielding AK-47s, and the WWII-era Pacific DLC adds bolt-action rifles like the Type 99, bayonet attachments, and landing craft for beach assaults. The Edelweiss DLC covers Allied airborne operations in late 1944, adding a different theatre and new side objectives. The voxel-based engine is deliberately low-poly, which is also why the game runs fine on hardware that would struggle with anything released in the last five years. What works exceptionally well is the AI. Enemy soldiers suppress, flank, and use vehicles in ways that regularly catch you off guard. Ally AI is similarly competent on foot, though vehicle pathfinding has always been a soft spot, with drivers occasionally making baffling decisions that players have been ribbing the game for since launch. The singleplayer Invasion mode holds up as a full campaign experience, and co-op lets friends drop into the same server, though the maps are large enough that you can spend a session fighting completely separate battles from your squad. That is occasionally a feature, occasionally a frustration, depending on how coordinated your group is. The modding community has been active for years, with total conversions covering everything from WWI to Warhammer 40K, which adds considerable replay value on top of an already content-rich base game. The genuine weaknesses are real and worth naming. The tutorial is thin, covering just enough to get you killed slightly less quickly. The UI still feels like something designed by engineers rather than players, and the overlay you need to check during live fights can momentarily obscure the action. Public multiplayer servers are inconsistent in population, and PvP specifically can feel sparse depending on the time of day. The game also has no story to speak of: there are factions, there are maps, and there is an enemy. That is the full narrative brief. Players who need context or a goal beyond territory control will not find it here. None of that stops Running With Rifles from doing its specific thing better than almost anything else in the top-down space. The moment a stalemate breaks because you called in a mortar strike on a machine gun nest while your squad pushed through a side alley is exactly the kind of chaotic, self-authored story the game is built to generate. A decade on from release it still has an active player base, seasonal events, and a modding scene that refuses to quit.

Alex · Scout Team

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