How to Install Rising Storm 2: Vietnam and Join a Server

The two sides in Rising Storm 2 do not have the same equipment, the same numbers or the same options, and the game makes no attempt to pretend otherwise.

The Americans get helicopters, artillery, napalm and radios. The Vietnamese get tunnels that put a squad behind your lines, traps in the undergrowth that nobody sees until somebody stops walking, and sappers carrying satchel charges towards things that were meant to be safe.

Balancing that is not done with statistics. It is done by making the two teams play completely different games on the same map, and it works far better than it has any right to. Listings collect on the hub, and this guide covers getting into a server and being useful once you are there — which in this game are two very different problems.

What it is

Antimatter Games built it with Tripwire, it came out in 2017, and it puts sixty-four players on a Vietnam map with an objective chain to fight over.

The lineage runs back through Red Orchestra 2 to the original Red Orchestra, and the family traits are all present: weapons that kill in one or two hits, no health regeneration worth the name, reinforcement waves rather than instant respawns, and a stubborn refusal to put a helpful marker on anything.

If you have played a modern military shooter, the adjustment is mostly downward. You are more fragile than you expect, you see less than you expect, and the map is not going to tell you where anybody is.

The mechanics that catch new players

Your weapon is not locked to the middle of the screen. Turning moves your view faster than it moves the rifle, so the barrel drifts within your field of vision and settles. Snapping the mouse to a target and firing immediately does not work the way it does elsewhere. You lead with the turn and let the weapon catch up.

Suppression is a real effect on you. Rounds passing nearby drain the colour from your screen and make aiming genuinely harder. A machine gunner who cannot hit anybody is still winning, because the six people with their heads down are not shooting either.

Death is quick and the wait is not. You respawn in waves rather than on a timer, so dying badly costs you a stretch of watching. This is the mechanic that makes people careful, and it is deliberate.

There is no killcam explaining what happened. You died from a direction. Working out where from is your job, and the whole game is people slowly building a picture of where the danger is.

Roles, and the one that matters most

You pick a role at the spawn screen and the slots are limited, which means the team's composition is a shared resource rather than everybody's individual choice.

Rifleman is the backbone and there is no shame in it.

Machine Gunner suppresses. Deploying on a bipod and covering an approach is one of the most useful things anybody does, and a deployed gun covering a street is a genuine problem for the other team.

Grenadier carries the launcher and clears positions that infantry cannot approach.

Marksman takes a scoped rifle, and the good ones make an entire flank unusable.

Sapper, on the Vietnamese side, carries explosives towards things that should not explode.

Squad Leader holds a squad together and, under the right conditions, is somewhere your squad can spawn. Playing squad leader badly costs your squad far more than playing rifleman badly costs anybody.

Radioman carries a radio and not much else, and is the most important player on the team.

That last one deserves explanation. The Commander's abilities — artillery, napalm, air support — need a radio to call them, and the radio is carried by a person. If the Radioman is dead or in the wrong place, the Commander is a man with opinions. Sticking near your Commander as Radioman is unglamorous, unrewarded by the scoreboard and decisive.

Helicopters

The American helicopters are flown by players, and the pilot slots are limited for good reason.

A transport pilot's job is to move a squad from the base to somewhere useful and land without killing them. That sounds simple. It is not, and a bad pilot ends eight people's lives in one go.

Gunships circle and provide fire. Door gunners on transports do the same at closer range. The whole thing is loud, visible from anywhere on the map, and draws every anti-air weapon the other team has.

Learn to fly somewhere private before you take one on a full server. This is the same advice every game with player-flown aircraft needs and it is ignored constantly.

The Vietnamese side is not the weaker one

New players see the equipment list and assume the Americans have the advantage. Servers with regulars know better.

Tunnels put a spawn point where the other team is not looking. Traps punish an advance that has stopped being careful. The undergrowth genuinely conceals people, and a patient player in a bush at the edge of an objective is close to invisible until they fire.

The Vietnamese game is ambush, patience and geometry. The American game is firepower, mobility and the clock. Both are complete, and players tend to develop a preference within a few evenings.

The voice lines on the Vietnamese side are in Vietnamese, which sounds like a small detail and does a great deal for how different the two sides feel to play.

Getting it and getting in

It is a paid game on Steam and it installs the ordinary way. The hardware demands are from 2017 and it is not a heavy game by current standards.

The server browser is in-game, and it is the primary route. Two things to filter on before ping:

Population. Rising Storm 2 needs bodies. A sixty-four-player map with twenty people on it is a long walk between contacts, and the modes are built for a full server. Joining the fullest server in your region is nearly always the right move.

The rules. Servers vary in how strictly they enforce role discipline, teamkilling penalties and what counts as acceptable behaviour towards new players. The good ones say so in the name or the message of the day.

Where a community gives you an address directly, use it. Take the port with the IP — a host running several servers on one machine has moved most of them off whatever the default is, and an address without its port fails in a way that looks like an offline server.

Favourite anything you enjoy on the first evening. The population in this game is concentrated on a small number of well-run servers, and finding a particular one again through a fresh browser query is a chore.

About the population

Honest assessment: Rising Storm 2 is past its peak and it is not empty.

The pattern is the one every game of this age follows. A handful of servers, mostly in Europe and North America, fill in the evening and are quiet the rest of the time. Judging the game by a browser query at three in the afternoon gives you a wrong answer.

Our guide to finding good game servers covers reading that pattern, and the short version is that a server which is full at nine every evening is a healthy server regardless of what the daytime figure says.

Being useful in the first hour

Play Rifleman. Take the role nobody is fighting over and learn the maps before you take a slot somebody else could use better.

Move with people. A lone player in Rising Storm 2 is a statistic. The people who survive are moving in threes and fours, and joining a group that is going somewhere is more valuable than any individual decision you can make.

Use voice, quietly. Direction, distance, what you saw. That is the whole vocabulary and it is enough.

Do not sprint into the objective. The objective is where the machine gun is pointing. Approaching from somewhere other than the obvious direction is most of the skill in this game.

Assume the bush has somebody in it. On the Vietnamese side, the bush is a position. On the American side, the bush is a problem you should be putting rounds into on principle.

Modes worth knowing

Territories is the standard: a sequence of objectives, one team attacking, reinforcements draining, and a clock.

Supremacy is larger and more open, with vehicles and multiple objectives contested at once. It plays more like a campaign than a match.

Skirmish is the smaller-scale version for servers that cannot fill sixty-four slots, and it is a reasonable place to learn.

Where a server votes between maps, our note on how server voting works explains why the map you wanted keeps losing to the one everybody already knows.

Problems you will actually hit

You die repeatedly without seeing anything. Working as intended, at first. The information in this game is built up over a round rather than handed to you, and the players who seem to know where everyone is have been reading the same map for twenty minutes longer than you.

Your shots are not landing. The free aim described above. Stop snapping and start turning, and let the weapon settle before you fire.

Nobody is using voice. Then you are on a server without a culture. There are better ones, and the difference between a server where people talk and one where they do not is enormous in this game specifically.

The helicopter you were in exploded on the ground. Somebody flew it badly, or somebody shot it well. Both are common and neither is your fault.

Everything looks empty. Check the population before joining rather than after. This game needs a full server and a third-full one is a long walk.

Where else to look

Red Orchestra 2 is the direct predecessor, on the same engine with the same fundamentals in a different war. Anybody who gets on with Rising Storm 2 should try it, and the reverse is also true.

Hell Let Loose is the current standard-bearer for large-scale, role-restricted infantry combat, with a stricter culture around communication. Squad takes the same ideas into modern warfare with a logistics layer that Rising Storm 2 does not attempt, and Squad 44 applies that engine to the Second World War. Beyond the Wire does the First.

If it is the lethality and the tension rather than the scale, Insurgency does it with a fraction of the players and none of the helicopters, and Arma 3 does it with all of the helicopters and no structure at all unless a community supplies one.

Rising Storm 2 sits in the middle of that group and does something none of the others do: it makes the two teams genuinely different, and it commits to that completely. That is worth an evening even now.

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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. Rising Storm 2: Vietnam servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page.