Insurgency: Sandstorm
Fair · Multiplayer · 2018
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
NO RUSH.
Fair at $29.99. Buy it if you want it.
- Length
- 22.6h
- Value
- $1.33/hr
- Reviews
- 85% positive
Recent reviews trending down: 73% over the last 30 days against 85% all-time.
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Minimum on the Steam store: 8 GB of memory, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760/AMD Radeon HD 7970, 40 GB of storage. Windows only.
Insurgency: Sandstorm is a hardcore tactical FPS built on lethal close-quarters combat and ruthless intensity. Every bullet count, every step matters, and teamwork is your only path to survival in the brutality of modern warfare.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
It has never been cheaper than $5.99. That was September 2026. It has been discounted 74 times in the 8 years tracked here, typically at 50 percent off, with about 5 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 3 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks.
Value puts it in the top 5 percent of the games it competes with. It is pricier than 97 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 91 percent. Among the games that feel like it, Insurgency ($14.99, scores 86) beats it on value, while it beats Day of Infamy ($14.99, scores 36).
Players rate it 85 percent positive over its lifetime, but the last 30 days run 73 percent. Something recent has soured the room. Of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews this site sampled, 25 come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written March 2026 to September 2026. That is more refunded reviewers than 8 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 490 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 124 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 52 percent of the 5,069 reviews written there were positive, against 85 percent overall, and those are 5 percent of everything written about it.
HowLongToBeat players log 22.6 hours as a typical playtime, and completionists log 247, 11 times as much.
Still 1.8K concurrent players, 8 years in.
The drop-off
79% start to 1% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
1,826 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
Actual mil sim game without the WORST controls and toxic 30 year old man fanbase that larp
Well-balanced, fun, nice to play in solo or with a team. Insurgency Sandstorm is my favourite shooter and its sad that not so many people play it. It's really so well-balanced for me. Great pacing, great variability. Favourite game mode: Ambush (no longer in main pool of game modes). The game is also CPU hungry for some reason.
One of the only FPS games that I've been able to enjoy, without feeling the need to rip my face off. Would recommend
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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Insurgency: Sandstorm scores 66/100 on the BANG Score (fair value). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/581320/insurgency-sandstormThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 12, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.