Glory to the Heroes Gameplay: Combat Guide, Modes, and Mechanics

Glory to the Heroes gameplay delivers an unforgiving, combined-arms military simulation set during the Russian-Ukrainian war. Developed by Ukrainian studio Deaf Tone Games on Unreal Engine 5, the game departs from traditional arcade shooters and special-forces fantasies, casting players as ordinary enlisted soldiers navigating brutal infantry firefights, incoming artillery, and lethal FPV drones across photogrammetry-scanned battlefields.

Survival on these front lines requires deep familiarity with ballistics, weapon handling, physical health management, and strict target identification. Whether deploying into matchmade tactical battles or long-running persistent servers, understanding the underlying combat loop is vital before stepping into the line of fire.

Core Combat Modes: Contact vs. Operations

Glory to the Heroes structures its multiplayer combat into two distinct modes alongside offline and cooperative options. Rather than relying on simple deathmatch rounds, every battle revolves around objective control, physical logistics, and persistent inventory consequences.

In Contact mode, matches move across contested sectors such as village blocks, ruined trench networks, and fortified factory floors. If your side loses the objective contest or suffers severe attrition, a limited retreat window opens. Extracting allows living players to rescue personal weapons and loot, while dying forfeits whatever gear was brought into the field unless secured in a base stash.

Operations servers provide an open-ended combined-arms sandbox. Teams coordinate assaults on multiple strategic bases simultaneously. Captured command positions give friendly forces forward spawn zones and direct access to personal inventory stashes without requiring a return to the main menu.

Classes, Factions, and Target Identification (PID)

Combat encounters feature the Ukrainian Ground Forces facing the Russian Ground Forces. Because the game features full friendly fire and eliminates floating nameplates or friendly HUD markers, positive target identification (PID) is one of the most critical gameplay skills.

Soldiers must visually identify teammates and hostiles through faction armbands and uniform camouflage:

• Ukrainian Forces: Identified by yellow, blue, or bright green armbands, paired with olive-yellow undertone field gear and centered night-vision mounts on tactical helmets.
• Russian Forces: Identified by white or red armbands, northern forest green-brown digital camouflage, and side-mounted helmet NVG brackets.

Playtest sessions reveal that gear clipping bugs can occasionally obscure armbands under heavy jackets. Before firing into a treeline or building, players must track team movement using the in-game Tactical Map—a coordinate system modeled after Ukraine's real-world "Kropyva" and "Delta" military situational awareness software.

Teams can select from ten specialized roles across both factions, including Rifleman, Marksman, Assaulter, Combat Medic, Light Anti-Tank (LAT), Sniper, Engineer, Driver, Artillery Man, and FPV Operator. Each class equips historically accurate weapons, such as the Ukrainian AK-74, AKS-74U, and RPG-7, or modernized Russian platforms including the AK-12, AK-105, and RPG-29 Vampir.

Players can enter battle using pre-built faction-issued kits or custom equipment purchased from in-game civilian vendors using Rubles or Hryvnias. While faction-issued loadouts are free and prevent gear fear, custom kits grant specialized weapon attachments, extended magazines, and extra medical equipment that can be stored permanently in your personal stash if you extract alive.

Hardcore Gunplay, Weapon Handling, and Stances

Gunplay in Glory to the Heroes is designed around weight, momentum, and advanced ballistics. Bullets track physical muzzle velocity, armor penetration tiers, and surface ricochets. Firing an unsuppressed weapon produces concussive reports that temporarily muffle hearing unless your soldier equips active tactical communication headsets.

Weapon control incorporates several mechanics that prevent run-and-gun tactics:

• Incremental Stance Adjustment: Scrolling the mouse wheel raises or lowers your weapon posture, alternating between high ready, compressed ready, and rested low-carry stances.
• Arm Fatigue Management: Keeping your weapon aimed down sights (ADS) rapidly strains your soldier's arms. If you hold ADS too long without resting, your sight picture experiences heavy sway and weapon shake.
• Dynamic Movement & Leaning: Characters lean contextually around hard cover and switch weapon shoulders to minimize exposure when clearing fatal funnels inside close-quarters environments.
• Stamina Constraints: Double-tapping the sprint key initiates a desperate high-speed sprint. However, heavy body armor and full backpacks drain stamina within seconds, leaving your soldier unable to jump, mantle walls, or steady a rifle until rested.
• Picture-in-Picture (PiP) Scopes: Magnified sniper and marksman optics render the magnified target zone independently from the surrounding peripheral vision.

Firearms are completely modular. The Gunsmith system allows field-stripping and replacing over 80 individual components on platforms like the AK-74, including dust covers, muzzle brakes, tactical lights, IR lasers, and canted red-dot sights.

Medical System and Field Survival

The medical model rejects simple regenerating health bars. Taking fire results in localized limb damage, severe pain, arterial bleeding, and compound fractures that degrade combat effectiveness until properly treated.

Ignoring wounds can quickly prove fatal. An untreated fracture caused by dropping from a high wall will prevent your soldier from sprinting, while unmanaged blood loss causes tunnel vision, sluggish movement, and unconsciousness. Players must also monitor hunger and thirst meters during lengthy Operations deployments, consuming field rations, canned goods, and bottled water found in abandoned civilian structures to avoid stamina exhaustion.

Battlefield Hazards and Modern Drone Warfare

True to the realities of the modern Ukrainian theater, direct small-arms engagements represent only a fraction of the threats present on each map.

Dedicated FPV Operators carry dedicated radio transmitters, video goggles, and backpack-mounted kamikaze drones equipped with High-Explosive (HE) or Thermobaric (TBG) warheads. Piloting an FPV drone uses true physics flight mechanics rather than automated waypoint navigation. While piloting, the operator is completely blind and immobile, requiring squadmates to maintain physical security over their trench or basement hideout. Drone flights are limited by battery life and radio signal degradation through dense foliage and concrete structures.

Ground infantry must also contend with external combat factors across varied environments:

• Chasiv Yar - Canal: A winter-spring urban battlefield dominated by multi-story apartment ruins, entrenchments, long sightlines, and sudden glide-bomb detonations.
• Fight for Krynky: An asymmetric river-crossing environment where Ukrainian marine forces navigate flooded reed wetlands, dense fog, and thermobaric TOS-1A barrages while pushing into ruined rural residential blocks.
• Izium Machine-Building Plant: A dense industrial layout comprising factory workshops, hangars, and narrow corridors favoring submachine guns, shotguns, and close-quarters room clearing.
• Audio Surveillance: Squad communication relies on local proximity voice and physical tactical radios. However, hostile infantry within earshot can hear powered radios and proximity chatter, making strict radio discipline essential during flanking maneuvers.

Playtest Optimization and Settings Tips

Alpha and Early Access stress tests reveal that Unreal Engine 5 rendering and high player counts place heavy demands on hardware. To stabilize frame rates during dense firefights, playtesters recommend several key configuration adjustments:

1. Disable Default Ray Tracing: Early builds activate experimental ray tracing features by default, which can heavily throttle modern GPUs. Switching lighting presets to lower-tier rendering options (such as LPV) recovers substantial frame rates.
2. Account for Scope Frame Drops: Because Picture-in-Picture scopes render two viewpoints at once, aiming through magnified optics can cause a temporary drop of 15–20 FPS. Players using mid-range graphics cards often find standard iron sights or non-magnified 1x red dot sights provide a far smoother combat experience.
3. Bind Canted Sights: Equipping a canted close-quarters optic alongside a primary scope lets you toggle aim profiles with a dedicated mouse thumb button, bypassing PiP scope lag when engaging unexpected close-range targets.
4. Tune Squad Audio Levels: Before deploying from base camp, access audio options to ensure local proximity voice and squad radio channels are balanced against weapon audio, ensuring vital enemy callouts cut through loud artillery impacts.