Squad is a multiplayer combat simulation game that is built on teamwork and combined arms tactics for competing teams to overcome each other and capture objectives. The gameplay draws a lot of inspiration from Arma, although the scale is smaller, with only a hundred players at a time, and faster-paced than what Arma aimed to build while chasing a total recreation of accurate warfare. Five years ago, developer Offworld Industries put Squad into early access on Steam, and now with Squad 1.0, it has made a full release.
Squad places itself inside the Gulf War of the nineties, creating battlefields in Kuwait and Iraq and the later counter-insurgency operations that took place in Iraq and Afghanistan that are still going on today. The game features seven factions, from American and Coalition allies, to a Middle East Alliance, and several insurgents. The official release saw the addition of the before mentioned Middle East Alliance, who is a coalition of Middle Eastern nations that are conducting counter-insurgency in their nations, along with the recreation of Fallujah. The first battle of Fallujah was a pivotal engagement seeing Nato and Iraqi allies securing the city from the remnants of the Ba’athist Iraqi governmental forces, and the second battle of Fallujah being the bloodiest battle in the Iraqi war. Squad hopes to emulate the close quarter’s experience of the siege with the new map. Fallujah is Squad’s most densely packed map to date with multi-tiered cities, courtyards, and narrow streets that marked the battlespace as unique in the whole conflict.
With the full release, Squad also got Steam Workshop support, making the game another sandbox for modders and wargamers to continue adding content to. It is possible that Squad evolves into a mostly user-created content platform much like Arma III has turned into, with the game surviving on players using the game as a platform to add more content that they want to see to the game.