How to Install Insurgency: Sandstorm and Join a Server

There is no ammunition counter in Insurgency: Sandstorm. There is a key you press to check your magazine, and it tells you roughly how heavy it feels.

Not a number. A feeling. Nearly full, about half, running low. If you have been firing in bursts across three engagements without reloading, you genuinely do not know how many rounds you have, and the moment you find out is the moment it matters. Reload early and you throw away everything left in the magazine, because the game keeps partial magazines and does not merge them back together.

That one design choice tells you most of what you need to know about this game. Listings collect on the Sandstorm hub here.

What it is and where it came from

Insurgency began as a Half-Life 2 mod. It became a standalone game in 2014, and Sandstorm is the 2018 successor, rebuilt on Unreal Engine 4 by the same studio.

The design brief never changed across those three versions: a shooter where getting shot once ends the conversation, where the interface tells you almost nothing, and where the difference between winning and losing an objective is whether four people moved at the same time or one after another.

It is a paid game on Steam.No Steam account yet? Our Steam guide sorts that out. Disk requirements are real and worth checking before you start the download.

The things that will kill you in the first hour

One or two hits. Body armour helps and does not save you. There is no regenerating health that returns you to full while you catch your breath behind a wall.

Friendly fire. It is on, and it is on properly. The person who came round the corner is a coin flip until you identify them, and the identification takes a fraction of a second you do not feel you have.

Sound. Footsteps carry, doors make noise, and a sprint across gravel announces you to everybody in the building. Walking is not a slower version of running here, it is a different tactical state.

The lack of a crosshair on the hip. You aim down the sights or you accept that you are spraying in the general direction.

Everybody else knowing the map. Sandstorm's objectives are held by people who have defended them a hundred times, and the approaches they cover are not obvious to somebody arriving fresh.

None of this is unfair. All of it is a deliberate rebalancing of what a shooter rewards, away from reflex and towards patience.

Supply points and the loadout screen

Before you spawn you assemble your kit from a budget rather than picking a preset.

Everything costs supply. A better rifle costs more. Optics cost more. Armour costs a lot, and a heavy vest slows you down as well as spending your budget. Extra magazines cost points that some players would rather spend on a grenade, and both choices are defensible.

The result is that two riflemen on the same team can be equipped completely differently, and both can be right. A player carrying a plain rifle with no optic and eight magazines is making a real argument about how the round is going to go.

Classes sit on top of this with per-team limits. The rifleman is the general-purpose slot. The breacher carries what you need for doors and close work. The demolitions role handles fortifications. The marksman covers distance, the gunner suppresses, and there is an observer whose entire job is to stand near one specific other person.

That person is the commander, and the pairing is the most interesting mechanic in the game. The commander can call in support — bombardment, gas, aircraft — but only while the observer is alive and close by. Killing the observer disarms the commander completely. On a well-organised server the pair moves together and the enemy hunts them specifically, and that is a small tactical game running inside the larger one.

The modes, and which one you want

Push is the headline competitive mode. One team attacks a sequence of objectives, the other defends, and the attackers have a reinforcement budget that shrinks. It produces the game's best moments and it is unkind to newcomers, because you are on a clock and your team knows it.

Firefight and Skirmish are smaller, faster and built around capturing zones with restricted respawns.

Checkpoint is the co-operative mode, and it is where most new players should start. A team of humans advances through a map against AI, taking objectives one at a time, with a limited pool of respawns that a wipe consumes. The AI is aggressive and shoots straight, so this is not a soft option — it is simply one where dying does not cost another human being their round.

Outpost is wave defence. Hold a position against escalating AI attacks for as long as you can.

Survival is the harsh one. Scavenge, hold on, and expect to lose.

Co-op servers running Checkpoint with modified difficulty are the busiest part of this game's community scene, and they are where the modding shows up most.

Mods, and how they reach you

Sandstorm's mods are distributed through mod.io rather than the Steam Workshop, which surprises people who expect every Unreal game to use Steam's system.

The practical effect is good. Servers declare what they run, and joining a modded server downloads what you need rather than requiring you to hunt for it first. Custom maps, altered weapon sets, changed AI difficulty and whole rule overhauls all arrive this way.

Expect the first join to a heavily modded server to spend a few minutes transferring content. This happens once per server rather than every time, and a loading screen sitting on a filename is doing something.

The one thing to know is that a server's mod set defines the experience more than its name does. Two Checkpoint servers can be a gentle introduction and a brutal endurance test depending entirely on what each has loaded.

Joining a specific server

1. Open the community server browser from the multiplayer menu. This is separate from the matchmaking button, and the matchmaking button is not what you want if you are reading a server directory.

1. Clear the filters before you conclude the list is empty. A filter left set to a mode nobody is running produces a convincingly dead-looking game. This catches people constantly.

1. Read what the server actually is. Name, mode, mod set and player count together tell you what you are about to join, and the mod set is the part people skip.

1. Favourite the ones that work out. Populations here concentrate on a modest number of well-run community servers with regulars, and the same server is a different place at nine in the evening than it is at three in the afternoon.

1. Take the port with the address if you are connecting directly. A host running several instances on one machine has moved most of them off the default, and an address without its port fails silently.

The hub here is where listings appear, queried directly rather than trusting a server's own account of how many people are on it.

Playing it well enough to be welcome

Three habits separate a new player everybody tolerates from one everybody quietly wishes would leave.

Move with someone. A player alone is a player who dies to an angle nobody was watching. Two players who stay within sight of each other survive engagements that kill either of them individually.

Say where things are, briefly. "Contact, second floor, blue building" is worth more than any amount of shooting. Sandstorm rewards information more than aim, and a team that talks beats a team that does not by an embarrassing margin.

Do not rush the objective alone because the timer is running. The reinforcement budget is a shared resource and spending it on individual optimism is how a round ends early.

The habit that takes longest to build is stopping. New players move continuously, because every other shooter has taught them that standing still is death. Here the opposite holds — a player who stops in cover, listens, and lets somebody else walk into the room they were about to enter will outlive a player who keeps pushing, every single time. Sound is information and you cannot hear anything while you are sprinting.

Hosting one

Server software is available and community servers are the backbone of this game, so running one is a reasonable thing to consider.

The considerations are mostly not technical. Slot count first — the instinct to set it high is nearly always wrong, and how many slots a game server should have explains why a full twenty-eight-slot server beats a half-empty sixty-four-slot one for every purpose that matters. Region second, because where the machine physically sits decides which half of your prospective players get a playable connection.

And then the hard part, which is that a server nobody joins is the normal outcome rather than the unlucky one. Why nobody joins your server is about the reasons, and most of them are fixable if you know them before you start rather than after.

Problems you will actually hit

The community browser is empty. Filters. Almost always filters.

You are stuck on a loading screen with a filename on it. Mod download on a first join. Give it longer than feels reasonable.

Kicked for a mod mismatch. The server updated its mod set and your cached copy is stale. Rejoining usually re-syncs it.

Shots that clearly hit do nothing. Check your ping before anything else. Tick rate explained covers what is happening between your machine and the server, and a lot of what feels like broken hit registration is distance.

You keep killing teammates. Slow down. Identification takes a moment and the moment is the point.

Terrible frame rate on a machine that should manage it. Sandstorm is heavier than it looks, particularly with a large player count and destruction happening. Turn down the settings that affect the whole scene rather than the ones that affect textures.

Where to go next

The immediate neighbour is its own predecessor. Insurgency 2014 is lighter, faster and still has committed servers, and the original Source mod that started all of it is still listed too.

If the appeal is organised infantry combat at a larger scale, Squad takes the same instincts and puts fifty a side on enormous maps with a command structure and vehicles. Hell Let Loose does something similar in a Second World War setting.

And if it is specifically the punishment you have taken to — one life, no interface, no forgiveness — Red Orchestra 2 has been doing this longer than anyone and has never once softened.

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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. Insurgency: Sandstorm servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page.