How to Install Darkest Hour: Europe '44-'45 and Join a Server

You do not know how many rounds you have left. There is no number in the corner of the screen. You can check, roughly, by having your character look at what he is carrying, and the answer comes back as an impression rather than a figure — a magazine that feels about half full.

That is Darkest Hour telling you what kind of game it is inside the first minute. Everything else follows from it: no crosshair floating in the middle of the screen, no marker over your teammates, no indication of who shot you or from where. The information a modern shooter hands you is the information this one deliberately withholds.

It is a free Western Front expansion of Red Orchestra, and listings for it collect on the Darkest Hour hub.

Read this before you plan an evening

Two honest warnings, and neither of them is a reason not to play.

Check what you need to own. Darkest Hour is free and it is built on Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45. Whether you also need a copy of that game is a question the store page answers and this guide will not, because the arrangement between free community projects and the commercial games they were built on has changed more than once over the years. Read the requirements on the store listing before you plan anything, rather than trusting a guide written at some unknown point in the past.

The population arrives on a schedule. This is not a game with a steady trickle of players across the day. It is a game where a community announces an event, forty people turn up at the agreed hour, and the server is full for three hours and empty for the rest of the week.

That second point changes how you approach the whole thing. Checking a server list on a Wednesday afternoon and concluding the game is dead is a reasonable mistake and a wrong one. Find the community first, find out when they play, and turn up then.

What it does differently

The Red Orchestra lineage was built in deliberate opposition to the shooters around it, and Darkest Hour takes that further rather than softening it.

Rifles are lethal and slow. One or two hits ends somebody. Between shots on a bolt-action you work the bolt, and being caught mid-cycle by a second target is a specific and very common way to die.

There is no crosshair from the hip. Aim comes from putting the sights up, and the sights themselves have range settings you are expected to adjust. Shooting at somebody four hundred metres away with the sight set for a hundred puts the round in the ground in front of them.

Machine guns want to be deployed. Fired standing, they are a waste. Set on a wall or a windowsill with a field of fire down a road, they become the reason an attack fails.

Tanks need crews and patience. Multiple positions, manual gunnery, no helpful indicator telling you the shell will land where the reticle is. Two competent people in a tank are worth more than six on foot, and a tank without infantry near it dies to someone who crawled up behind it.

Reinforcements run out. Each team has a pool, deaths draw it down, and a side that has thrown itself at an objective too many times loses on arithmetic rather than on the last firefight. You do not respawn instantly either — you wait for a wave with everybody else, which means a bad assault costs your team a minute of coordinated absence.

The effect of all this is that ninety per cent of the game is moving carefully, and the remaining ten per cent is extremely quick. New players find the first part boring for about two hours and then stop finding it boring permanently.

What the Western Front does to the maps

The setting is not decoration. Red Orchestra was built around the Eastern Front, which meant open ground, enormous distances and tank engagements at ranges where the enemy is a shape. Darkest Hour moves west, and the terrain changes what the game asks of you.

Normandy's hedgerows are the clearest example. Fields bounded by earth banks and thick vegetation, with gaps that everybody knows about and nobody wants to be first through. Visibility collapses to the length of a field, tanks lose most of their range advantage, and an attack becomes a sequence of short, ugly problems rather than one long approach.

Towns do something similar in a different register. Streets are killing grounds and buildings are the only way forward, which puts the fighting at ranges where a rifle's slow rate of fire is a genuine liability and a submachine gun finally earns its place.

Then there are the maps that open out — river crossings, airfields, ground where the armour has room and infantry are extremely exposed. Those are the ones where a well-placed machine gun decides an hour.

The pattern to take from this is that no single approach works everywhere. Kit selection and pace are map-dependent in a way that most shooters have quietly abandoned.

Officers, artillery and the reason to talk

There is a command layer sitting above the shooting, and it is where matches are won.

Officers carry the ability to call in artillery, and artillery in this game is not a killstreak — it is a large, slow, imprecise weight of fire dropped on a map square, and it takes somebody with eyes on the target telling somebody with the radio where to put it. A well-called barrage on a defended position converts an attack that was going to fail into one that succeeds.

It also means that as an ordinary rifleman your most valuable contribution is frequently information. Where the machine gun is. Which building they are in. Whether the tank has moved.

Servers running organised events go further, with assigned command structures and people who take the role seriously. That is the version of this game worth finding, and it is why the community matters more than the server browser.

Installing it

The download is small — this is an early-2000s Unreal engine and the file sizes are from that era. Install it through Steam alongside whatever it requires, and let it finish its first run before you go looking for a server.

Our Steam guide covers the account, and getting two-factor on it before you own anything is time well spent.

Hardware is not a consideration. The game will run at whatever frame rate your monitor can display on a machine of any recent description. What is worth adjusting is the field of view and the resolution, both of which the game may guess badly on a modern widescreen display.

Spend fifteen minutes in a practice or offline session first if the game offers one. Learning that the sights have range settings while forty people are relying on you is not the moment.

Finding a server and connecting

The in-game browser is the usual route and it works through Steam's server infrastructure. Filter to servers with people on them, because an empty Darkest Hour server is not a lobby you can seed by yourself.

For a specific server — the one a community gave you the address for — Unreal-engine games take a typed command rather than the connect you would use on a Source game. Open the console and use open followed by the address:

open 198.51.100.19:7788

Use the exact address and port from the listing rather than assuming a default. This engine family does not use the 27015 you may know from Source games, and in any case a host running several servers on one machine has moved most of them somewhere of its own choosing. An address without its port is the ordinary reason a connection appears to do nothing.

Server listings collect on the Darkest Hour server list, where entries are queried directly rather than trusting what a server claims about itself. In a game whose population is scheduled rather than continuous, a directly measured player count is the difference between finding the event and missing it.

Favourite everything and follow the community

The browser has a favourites tab. Put every server you find in it.

Then find the people. Games with event-driven populations live in their communities rather than in their server lists, and the group organising the Sunday evening game is the thing you actually want to find. Our communities directory is a reasonable place to start, and our note on what makes a server listing trustworthy covers reading a listing for the signs that an organised group is behind it.

How to be useful on your first night

Stay with people. A lone player in this game is a player who dies to something he never saw. Moving with three others means somebody is watching a direction you are not.

Use cover as cover, not as scenery. The maps are built with real cover and real approaches. Crossing an open field because it is the direct route is how a team loses its reinforcements.

Take a rifle first. The specialist kits — machine gunner, anti-tank, tank crew — are limited in number and matter to the team. Learn the maps with an ordinary rifle before you take something somebody else could use better.

Set your sights. For anything past close range, adjust them. This is the single most commonly ignored mechanic and the reason new players think their rifle is inaccurate.

Listen and talk. Voice is how anything gets organised in a game with no map markers. Saying "machine gun in the second building" is worth more than any number of kills.

Accept dying to nothing. You will be shot by somebody you never resolved, from a distance you did not think was in play, and the game will not tell you where they were. That is the design working.

Where it sits

Darkest Hour belongs to a specific tradition, and if you like it, the tradition is where to go next.

Red Orchestra 2 is the direct commercial successor, with the same lethality on a much later engine, and Rising Storm 2 takes that engine to Vietnam with helicopters and a very different pace. Both have larger populations than this does.

Hell Let Loose and Squad 44 are the modern inheritors of the same idea — fifty a side, organised, punishing — and Beyond the Wire applies it to the First World War, which is an even harder sell and produces some remarkable evenings.

Further back, Day of Defeat is the older, faster, less simulationist take on the same war, and it has outlived nearly everything.

None of them do the specific thing Darkest Hour does, which is take a twenty-year-old engine, remove almost every piece of assistance a shooter normally provides, and hand it to a community that has spent a decade and a half getting good at it. That is a small audience by definition. Our guide to finding the best game servers applies, with one adjustment for this game: find the evening before you find the server.

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JoinGG is a live directory of community game servers. Every listing is queried directly every fifteen minutes, so the player count you see was measured rather than reported by its owner, and each one carries a copyable connect address. Darkest Hour: Europe '44-'45 servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page.