Squad

I've logged enough hours in tactical shooters to know when a game is genuinely interrogating what coordinated combat can feel like, and Squad passes that test harder than almost anything else on PC. It sits at a deliberate midpoint between full Arma-style simulation and the accessibility of Battlefield, and that positioning is what makes it so compelling to analyze. The ticket system, the FOB logistics network, the layered command structure from nine-person squads up to a voted-in commander calling UAV recon and artillery strikes -- these are systems with real strategic weight. Losing a tank costs your team tickets. Failing to keep a Forward Operating Base supplied with a logistics truck cuts off your respawn points. Every decision has downstream consequences, which is the kind of design I want to see more of. The class roster rewards specialization and punishes selfishness. Riflemen resupply ammo for the fireteam. Medics hold left-click to revive downed players under fire, a deliberate concession to playability over pure simulation. Light Anti-Tank kits exist specifically to counter vehicle rushes, crewman and pilot kits lock you into operating APCs and helicopters that require a full crew to be effective. Nobody wins carrying a 9-person squad alone, and the game enforces that socially, not just mechanically. Your microphone is a loadout item. Squad leaders coordinate via radio comms while proximity voice chat keeps your fire team in contact. A quiet team is a losing team, by design. The game modes give those systems room to breathe. Advance and Secure (AAS) and its randomized variant RAAS keep flag capture unpredictable enough that no two matches play out identically. Invasion flips the ticket logic entirely, letting attackers win on pure cap speed regardless of respawn bleed. Destruction and Insurgency mode add cache hunting and asymmetric pressure. The recent Fireteam PvE co-op mode, added in Update 10.1, condenses the core experience into five-player tactical missions for players who want to learn the systems without being shouted at by a stranger on a 100-player server -- a genuinely smart on-ramp for newcomers. The mod SDK, available free, means community-built maps and modes extend the lifespan well beyond what Offworld ships officially. The honest downsides: optimization has historically been a pain point, with CPU-heavy combat zones causing frame drops even on solid hardware, though post-launch patches have made meaningful progress. The tutorial does the bare minimum. New players who skip the training server and jump straight into a 100-player RAAS match will have a rough first hour, possibly several rough hours. Server quality is inconsistent -- a well-organized community server and a chaotic public one are almost different games. The graphics, especially on older maps, show the Unreal Engine 4 roots clearly, though the more recent move toward UE5 and ongoing map updates are closing that gap. For anyone with a strategic mindset who has ever felt shortchanged by the shallow team mechanics in mainstream shooters, Squad offers a density of decision-making that will hold up across hundreds of hours. Pick a server with an active community, put a headset on, and accept that your first ten hours are tuition, not entertainment. What you get after that is the most operationally coherent combined-arms experience available on PC right now.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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