Just over a month ago, OWI finally introduced one of the most anticipated factions to its flagship shooter, Squad.
The Armed Forces of Ukraine update added a new flavor to familiar weapons and vehicles, but even the most exciting new content drop did little to fix some of the core problems highlighted by the players.
Now, as 2025 draws to a close, the developers have announced a new round of playtests aimed at reforming the movement and shooting mechanics of the game once more, just as players had gotten used to how Squad plays today.
While part of the community is optimistic, others are concerned: is Squad really a finished game when its core mechanics change more often than a soldier changes mags in a firefight?
Squad Opens Pandora’s Box
Squad has had plenty of ups and downs since the core team broke off from the Project Reality development to make a standalone game.
One of the more divisive moments in its history is the Infantry Combat Overhaul update (henceforth referred to as ICO), a revolutionary change to movement and shooting released in late 2023.
ICO made shooting harder, running would throw off your aim, and players went from feeling like Rambo to cowering in a trench, crying for mama. Just like in real life, some argued.
The release of ICO started multiple online wars, with many vocal players arguing that it would kill the game. This reception contrasted with the Steam reviews of the game, which have sat on Very Positive since.
Storefront feedback was not enough to convince OWI, however. The developers have recently announced the beginning of a new playtest round aimed at ‘infantry combat tuning changes’.
The decision to tinker with the gameplay again is a confusing one, especially after the gameplay post-ICO had found a sweet spot that the Squad playerbase was, for the most part, collectively happy with.
Even admitting some imperfections with the mechanics, it’s hard to justify opening Pandora’s Box of gunplay right after the dust had settled, and that points to Squad’s main problem.
Development Meets Fog of War
Whether you consider it a common problem in game development or brilliant meta commentary on military leadership, the main problem with Squad is that OWI does not seem to have a clear idea of what is and isn’t a priority.
Asking the playerbase to help with this does not seem to go too far either, since most vocal parts are deeply entrenched in the ‘Squad is the best’ and ‘Squad is dead’ camps. Abandon all hope, ye who seek nuance.
The transition to Unreal Engine 5 was controversial, given how it locked a portion of the playerbase out of the game due to hardware requirements.
This was especially felt among the game’s earliest supporters who had Squad as their primary game and had not updated their computer in a while. Timing was not on OWI’s side here, as data center needs obliterated the global supply of computer parts around the same time as the update was released.
It’s hard to judge the company for wanting to upgrade a game’s engine, though: Squad’s maps have been getting bigger and more detailed, and this made performance poor on mid-range computers on the Unreal Engine 4 builds.
A more puzzling development is the introduction of the Fireteam PvE mode, with a confusing business model that locks half the maps behind a paywall but fundamentally showcases the spiritual confusion about Squad at OWI.
DLC Jamming
Fireteam, in OWI’s own words, “condenses the core essence of the Squad experience into shorter, replayable missions”. This new quick format still uses the same mechanics as regular Squad, and that currently includes the gunplay that was specifically designed to make firefights longer and more intense.
Now that Fireteam has been released and, crucially, sold for real money, it places all of Squad into an awkward place as a new gameplay change looms.
If the developers do another deep rework of the game’s fundamental mechanics, it stands to reason that they will also have to be adequate for Fireteam. The problem is that while Fireteam is fun, it is also divorced from the core gameplay loop of Squad, and is unlikely to solve the onboarding crisis that makes servers churn through squad leaders.
It appears that, once again, OWI is stuck in the cycle that Squad veterans know and dread: trading a stable era in the game for a turbulent period without a clear end goal.
Squad and its Fireteam DLC are currently available on Steam, and you can buy the base game for $19.99 until January 5th.
