As someone who persistently tries to enjoy tactical shooters, I found Squad to be a very frustrating game. I love the pieces but not the sum of the parts. If Squad was a Lego set, I’d rather use the bricks to build something else.

Squad is a great idea. It takes the boring organisational parts of Arma 3 out of the way so you can spend more time playing the game and enjoying the action. The game play is supported by loads of fun weapons, vehicles and factions. Diverse maps, solid movement mechanics and a good radio system which I found easy to use (once I had changed my keybinds to match Arma). The developers are continually supporting and updating the game, long time players would butt in here and highlight the ups and downs of the update history but at least the developers are there trying to improve the game. Or at the very least keep it fresh. It’s all sounding good so far, so where does my frustrating come from?

Firstly, one minor frustration that inconvenienced me on 80% of the sessions I played was that I could not create a party/group in the main menu and queue with my friends. I was trying to join servers in a group of 4-9 people for most of my playing time and it always added a layer of hassle that we couldn’t queue up together in some sort of quick play list.

However, the main drive of my frustrations comes from something outside of the developer’s control. Squad relies heavily on those around you, meaning your fellow players. Offworld Industries provides the tools, but the players create the game. And unfortunately, when I played solo I found a Mos Eisley motley crew of whinge bags, poor leaders, unhelpful team players and worst of all the gormless. I myself was one of the latter gormless players who more than anything got in the way of those around me. I’ll share two anecdotes about different experiences I had in the game to highlight the different player types I’ve critically identified.

“I had solo queued into a fresh lobby and joined a random public squad. We headed out fairly normally from HQ but no one wanted to take on the fireteam lead slots. That was the fine until our squad leader decided to not immediately go for the OBJ and instead take a more logistical approach by securing a flank. At this point applications for fireteam lead were flying in and many voices of great wisdom tried to persuade the squad lead to change his course of action. They simply demanded he did what they wanted without explaining why their course of action was better, the squad lead had admitted his inexperience earlier in the game but did not relent to their demands. At this point 2/3 of the squad abandoned the plan and went off doing their own thing for the rest of the game. I remained with the squad leader and pointlessly followed him around for 45 minutes. We achieved nothing. But equally our other squad mates who went off on their own to the OBJ did not work together so they also achieved absolutely nothing.”

“I decided to give the squad leader role a try as I was playing with a full infantry section (i.e 9 people) from my arma group. Upon joining I tried to get some advice from the higher command structure about what my squad should do. This was met with a long silence and then the beginning of a new conversation. I would continue to seek guidance throughout the game. But I figured no one else had time to hold my hand through the game so I decided to make some plans for us… and what a ♥♥♥♥ show that became. We got squad wiped many times in a row, all of which were the fault of myself and the extreme expertise shown by our opponents. If I was Neville Chamberlain, I was facing down Napolean, Genghis Khan, Caesar and Saladin. We lost every game that night and it was the last time many of us tried to play Squad”

A skill issue. That’s my frustration with Squad, I’m simply not good at it. But I’m also not willing to get good at it in the current community landscape, so is the answer that I shouldn’t play? At the moment, the answer is yes. There’s plenty of YouTube guides out there and if I ever want to recreate my COVID years at university I know Squad is there for me. At the start of this “review” which has turned into the mother of all rambles, I praised Squad for taking the organisational burden away from Arma 3. However, that is also why I’ve quit Squad and I have 2,000 hours on Arma 3. In Arma players are put into roles that suit them and are shown how to do different things in the game by a human being, not a YouTube video. Arma 3 is a proficient noob academy that encourages new players to learn and get better. Squad takes a Spartan approach to learning, you either do it right or you die.

To conclude Squad could be fantastic and I think it’s worth trying. But only if you don’t mind independently learning a game with a fair amount of nuance and rules of thumb. If you can go with the flow and appreciate the good games when they come to you and spend your time listening to other people recount that one incredible game. Then Squad is worth a purchase because the pieces made by Offworld are really good. Good luck and remember I’ve only got 17 badly played hours and a whole host of Arma 3 nostalgia.