Raid: World War II, you might remember this game coming out? I don’t. It certainly has a bland name (though you can’t fault it for being unclear about what the game is lol) but suffice to say the story goes that on release this game flopped compared to similar co-op heist/raid shooters like it even though the development team was well situated to make a hit on paper.
The weird thing is, at some point since a small passionate team of developers were given more creative control, and all of a sudden diehard fans of Payday 2 and similar games are singing the praises of Raid: World War II, in 2025, which is a game released in 2017 on an already out of date engine… Weird, but the reason that should matter to you is that the game is far cheaper than it should be for the quality and amount of content in the game and the only real drawback is the game is made on an engine clearly long in the tooth (I mean I love Xonotic so… it is all a matter of perspective I guess lol).
Also, it just feels especially relaxing right now to blast Nazis and steal their gold!
The tutorial is very quick, fun and doesn’t require a big investment of focus or time, you get to the fun bits fast. This a great pick up and play game on the Deck to play with friends or by yourself.
I would describe the feel of this game to something like Warhammer Vermintide 2 but with guns (though I believe this game is literally made on the same engine as Payday 2, so that is a good comparison as well). There is a ridiculous amount of enemies and battles can be quite frantic (there are almost always mounted MGs placed in convenient places for you to use for example). There is also stealth mechanics/options too.
This game is a blast on the Steam Deck, though I guess it is worth noting that I play all kinds of shooters (PVE and PVP) on the Steam Deck using the onboard joysticks and gyro so your personal comfort playing with the onboard controls may vary.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/414740/RAID_World_War_II/
On the other hand if you are looking for a PVP heist game that seems to have similarly fallen on its face (though it is much earlier in its development cycle, being in early access) despite actually being an awesome game underneath, check out Due Process which is currently a whopping $1. This seems like the kind of game that might go FTP, so you might end up being able to get it for free one day, but I think the amount of game on display here already is easily worth $1, especially because it combines common FPS PVP and PVE tropes in ways that R6 Siege seems to have largely failed to do as successfully. Watch some gameplay before judging it as a $1 shooter.
I’m pretty sure everyone just saw the name and assumed it was somehow related to Raid: Shadow Legends, one of the most hated games in the world.
You forgot to mention John cleese is in the game.
Yeah, well that is how good the game is! FMV of John Cleese is a detail here.
Supersquirrel, I really appreciate the effort you put into your game recommendations. You really do a good job of explaining why a game is worth checking out.
Also, the Due Process game just changed their anti-cheat to support Linux, which is great to see.
Supersquirrel, I really appreciate the effort you put into your game recommendations
longish response :P TL;DR thank you!
Thanks, I know I can be intense and word vomit up stuff sometimes, but I feel like the best way I can add to the fediverse is indie game recommendations at the end of the day lol… so it makes me happy to hear that, thank you!
People spend a lot of time talking about how small the fediverse is, but in someways I am shocked by how small the rest of the open internet feels these days in certain niches. One of those is personal, good game recommendations for oddball or indie games that aren’t video format and aren’t hosted on ad-infested gaming websites that have long since had their soul ripped out by some company that bought them up…
It is really fun to contribute recommendations here, this place already feels so vibrant for how comically obscure of a corner of the internet we are in lol… and I might as well spend my time contributing game recommendation here, because here I can know I am contributing to a community not a company’s property that can be shut down and locked away.
I know that even if this instance gets shut down that my recommendations will have been copied by multitudes of other instances that interacted with the instance I put my recommendation on, and if people found it useful or helpful it will keep bouncing around somewhere.
For me it is a joy to spend an inordinate amount of energy and time on thoughtful indie game recommendations, especially because this is such a difficult time for the industry, I want indie game developers to get paid so they don’t give up on making amazing games!
Due process was amazing and it just died way too soon to reach its potential.
Yeah, unfortunately with any game that requires a decent number of online users to work, it’s not enough to just be a great game. You need either luck or a lot of money to spend on advertising to get the necessary player amounts to function.
Or have a singleplayer mode to at least give people a reason to stick around.
A good bot system would salvage this game for the few fans it has… If only.
