Squad (video game)

Squad is a realism-based military tactical first-person shooter video game developed and published by Canadian indie developer Offworld Industries exclusively through the Steam distribution platform. It is a spiritual successor to the Project Reality modification for Battlefield 2. The game depicts realistic modern warfare between military and paramilitary factions in large and expansive battlefields. Squad became available on Steam Early Access in December 2015, and was officially released on Steam in September 2020.

Gameplay
Squad is a tactical shooter based around squad gameplay designed to encourage teamwork and communication. A match is played between two belligerent teams, with each team being made up of squads that cap at nine players. Players in squads select from various soldier classes which play distinct roles in combat, such as suppressive fire from an automatic rifleman, anti-tank support from a MANPATS gunner, or medical support from a combat medic. A squad of players is led by a squad leader, who can communicate with other allied squad leaders and construct structures such as forward operating bases and defensive emplacements. Any squad leader can additionally nominate himself for the position of commander, who, once voted into position, can coordinate his team's battle plan and call in additional support such as UAV recon and artillery.

Squad borrows many of its gameplay aspects from its predecessor, Project Reality, with its game modes placing heavy emphasis on team coordination. Matches take place on extremely large realistic battlefields up to 36 km2 in size, facilitating the use of a wide variety of vehicles such as main battle tanks, armored personnel carriers, transport trucks, and helicopters. The two teams, utilizing vehicle and infantry warfare, compete over various objectives, such as strategic locations to hold or weapon caches to destroy. To facilitate maneuver warfare, squad leaders can construct forward operating bases around the map, which provide a team-wide location for soldiers to respawn and must be kept supplied by a logistics network.

Both teams are kept in check by the "ticket" system, which simulates combat effectiveness. The loss of strategic locations, destruction of forward operating bases or vehicles and soldier deaths all remove tickets from a team's pool. A match ends once a team's ticket pool has been reduced to zero. A team that fails at defending too many of its strategic objectives will begin to lose tickets rapidly, starting at a loss of one per minute and capping out at a maximum of ten per minute. As such, teams have the ability to achieve victory in multiple ways, such as exhausting the enemy's ability to fight or by completing all of their tactical objectives.

There are currently thirteen playable factions in Squad, which are divided into three categories; BLUFOR, REDFOR, and INDFOR, and change based on the map and game mode being played. The real-life militaries featured include the United States Army, United States Marine Corps, British Army, Canadian Army, Australian Army and Turkish Land Forces for the BLUFOR side, as well as the Russian Ground Forces, Russian Airborne Forces, People's Liberation Army and People's Liberation Army Navy Marine Corps for the REDFOR. Three unconventional stock factions are included as part of INDFOR: the Insurgents, modeled after various Middle Eastern insurgent groups; the Irregular Militia, modeled after paramilitary forces in Eastern Europe and the Balkans; and the Middle Eastern Alliance, a fictional military alliance amalgamation of the armed forces of various Middle Eastern and Central Asian countries.

Development
Development of Squad was announced in October 2014 when Project Reality developer Sniperdog (a.k.a. Will Stahl ) made a post on the Project Reality forums. The announcement carried the news that the team of fifteen was making a spiritual successor to Project Reality on Epic Games' Unreal Engine 4.

The game's Kickstarter campaign started in May 2015. It featured six backer levels with various rewards such as merchandise, in-game rewards, and pre-alpha testing access. Five days after the Kickstarter launch, the game had raised over $200,000.

On April 5, 2015, Squad appeared in Steam's Greenlight service and was announced in an update called "Vote For Us". It was officially greenlit eight days later.

Squad was released on Steam Early Access on December 15, 2015, and officially released on Steam on September 23, 2020.

Squad is currently at version 8.0 as of the 13th of June, 2024.

Reception
As of 2022, the game has sold over 3 million copies.