How to Install Insurgency Standalone and Join a Server

Insurgency will kill you before you have worked out where the shot came from, and it will do it in your first thirty seconds. This is not a difficulty setting. It is the game.

There is no health bar, no regenerating shield, no crosshair in the middle of your screen, and no hit marker telling you that you connected. A rifle round kills. Both ways. There are 31 servers listed here, and the population that remains is people who wanted exactly that.

What you need

• A Steam account
• Insurgency, a paid game, frequently discounted heavily
• Around 12 GB free

New to Steam? Our Steam guide covers the account and the settings worth changing on day one.

Which Insurgency is this

Three things share the name and the store does not separate them well.

• Insurgency — the 2014 standalone game on the Source engine. This one, and what the servers here are running.
• Insurgency: Modern Infantry Combat — the original 2007 free modification for Half-Life 2, which is where the series started. It has its own small server population.
• Insurgency: Sandstorm — the 2018 sequel on Unreal Engine. A different game with a different community.

The 2014 game is the middle one, and it is the one with a community server culture in the older sense — individual machines, individual admins, regulars who know each other.

Step 1: install

Install from your Library. Files land in steamapps/common/insurgency2, and the folder that matters is insurgency inside it.

Launch once and let the first-run setup and shader caches finish before judging how it runs.

Step 2: enable the console

Options, then the keyboard settings, and enable the developer console. Or add -console to the launch options through the game's Properties in Steam.

You need it to join a server by address, which on a game with 31 servers is often more practical than browsing.

Step 3: understand what makes this different

Worth reading before your first match, because the habits from other shooters actively work against you here.

There is no crosshair. You aim down the sights. Firing from the hip is for emergencies at three metres and nothing else. The game does not draw a dot to help you.

One or two rounds kill. Yours and theirs. There is no trading damage, no winning a fight because you had more health left. Whoever sees the other first usually wins, and that makes positioning worth more than aim.

There is no minimap showing enemies. You have a compass and whatever your team tells you. If nobody is calling contacts, nobody knows anything.

Ammunition is counted in magazines, not bullets. Reloading a partly used magazine keeps it, but you cannot see exactly how many rounds are in the one you are holding — you get a rough sense by weight. Reloading at the wrong moment because you guessed wrong is a normal way to die.

Supply points buy your loadout. Before a round you spend a fixed budget on a weapon, optics, armour and equipment. Heavier armour slows you down. A better optic costs points you might have spent on grenades. The trade is the interesting part.

Step 4: the modes

Server browsers here list a handful of distinct game types and they are not interchangeable.

Checkpoint is co-operative. A team of humans advances through objectives against AI, with counter-attacks between them. This is where most of the remaining population plays and it is the easiest place to start.

Push is the attack-and-defend competitive mode. One team advances through objectives on a timer, the other holds.

Firefight is the round-based mode. Three objectives, no respawns except when your team captures one, which turns every capture into a decision about whether to push on or hold and let people return.

Skirmish and the smaller modes fill out the rest, appearing on servers that run their own rotations.

Checkpoint against AI is genuinely good and is not a consolation prize. On a game this size it is also the mode most likely to have people on it at any hour.

Pick a class, not just a gun

Each mode gives the team a set of roles with limited slots, and they are not cosmetic labels.

Rifleman is the default and the most flexible: a standard rifle, a reasonable supply budget, no restrictions. The right choice for a first evening.

Support and the machine gun roles carry weapons that are only useful from a fixed position with a bipod down. Excellent at holding a corridor, useless while moving, and taken by people who have decided to defend something.

Demolitions carries explosives for destroying objectives and the fortifications around them. On modes where an objective must be destroyed rather than captured, somebody has to be this.

Sniper and marksman roles are limited per team for the obvious reason. They are also less dominant here than in most games, because the maps are tighter than they look and a scoped rifle indoors is a liability.

Commander and Specialist, where a server runs them, unlock fire support — the ability to call in a strike. This is the single largest force multiplier in the game and it requires the two players to be alive and near each other.

The general rule is that the exotic roles are worse for a new player than Rifleman, and the players who take them on a competitive server expect you to know what the role is for.

Step 5: find a server

The in-game browser lists what is out there and sorts poorly, which is standard for this generation.

Our Insurgency list queries each server directly every fifteen minutes, so the counts are measured rather than reported, and each entry carries a copyable address.

With 31 servers in the world, reading the whole list takes a minute. Populations concentrate heavily — a few servers hold nearly everyone, and they fill in the evening in their own region.

Step 6: connect

Console:

connect 74.91.113.116:27015

Copy the port with the address. 27015 is the default, and hosts running several servers have moved most of them elsewhere.

First join to a modded server downloads its custom content. Source handles this well when the server has a fast download host configured, and slowly when it does not. It happens once per map.

The chat commands

Populated servers run SourceMod, so the standard set applies. Typed in normal chat rather than the console:

• !rtv — vote to change the map.
• !nominate — put a map on the vote.
• !motd — the server's rules page.
• !admin — page a moderator.

Community servers here frequently add their own menus for loadout presets or difficulty voting. !menu is the usual way in.

Turn the sound up

This is the setting that matters most and it is not a graphics option.

Insurgency gives you almost no visual information about the enemy — no outlines, no markers, no minimap dots — and compensates by making audio unusually informative. Footsteps on different surfaces sound different. Reloads are audible through thin walls. A weapon fired two rooms away tells you the calibre and roughly the direction.

Players who do well in this game are mostly players who are listening. Headphones are close to mandatory, and turning the music off in the audio options is one of the few genuinely competitive adjustments available.

The same applies in the other direction. Your own footsteps carry, sprinting is loud, and walking is quiet. The crouch and walk keys are not decorative.

Settings that persist

insurgency/cfg/autoexec.cfg runs at startup and survives updates. config.cfg is rewritten every time the game closes, so edits there are lost.

Problems you will actually hit

You keep dying instantly and cannot tell why. Working as designed. Slow down, use cover, stop sprinting into open ground, and start listening — audio carries a great deal of information in this game and most new players ignore all of it.

"Server is running an older version". The server has not restarted since the last update. Nothing to fix on your end.

Missing textures on a custom map. The download did not complete. Reconnect and let it finish.

Everything is dark. The game is deliberately unlit in interiors and it is unforgiving on a badly calibrated monitor. Raise gamma in the video options rather than fighting it.

The browser is empty. Refresh, check the filter is on Internet, and if it stays empty use the list and connect by address.

Where to go next

If the tactical, low-time-to-kill approach is what appeals rather than this specific game, the original Insurgency: Modern Infantry Combat is the free Half-Life 2 modification the series grew out of, and it still has servers.

If it is the Source engine community server culture more broadly, Counter-Strike: Source, Day of Defeat: Source and Team Fortress 2 all use the same console, the same download behaviour and the same autoexec.cfg convention described here, and all have considerably larger populations.

And for co-operative shooting against AI specifically, Left 4 Dead 2 is the other Source game built entirely around it.

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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 Standalone servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page, and Insurgency Standalone's own numbers — servers online, players now, activity by hour — are on its statistics page.