Greentext

Well, Squad does have those two things you specifically mention:

Generally speaking, reload animations take roughly the amount of time seen in actual combat footage and reported by various available US and UK publicly available military studies.

It also has delays for starting up vehicles, although this is essentially near 0 for most light vehicles, long for APCs and Tanks, and quite long for helicopters.

These mechanics you say are overrealistic, I say actually work to promote team based tactics, squad communication, ultimately more realistic tactics in general, in addition to being at least 'realistic'.

For weapons, a whole lot of effort has gone into fine tuning especially sniper rifles and squad automatic weapons, to represent them reasonably accurately, allowing for highly skilled players to do things with them which, while rare and often generally officially discouraged, absolutely have been used and are effective in extremely niche or desperate scenarios.

Basically what this means is you cannot run around with a sniper rifle and quickly no scope or scope in and take out a target without basically both significant luck and skill. Likewise for running and gunning with a squad automatic weapon, or in general moving and blasting at full auto with anything but roughly a submachine gun.

The code side of it is interesting, basically recoil becomes cumulatively more extreme with each uncontrolled shot.

What this allows for is ok, point blank range? Full auto can certainly still be effective, but it is not as effective as calmly placed single shots or bursts.

But as you say COD has a toxic community and youve never found an FPS without one?

Squad is actually shockingly refreshing on that, when compared to basically every other competitive shooter game that you can generally play by just dropping into a random server, and is also realistically themed.

To the extent that its not uncommon to find on a random public server a squad leader who is advertising that they enjoy teaching newbies the ropes, and they genuinely do enjoy this. There is of course some toxicity in general, but it is orders of magnitude less than COD.

You will be flamed though if you do exceptionally dumb things to do in Squad, like try to fly the one helicopter your team gets on a map and use it as your own personal transit to be almost certainly blown up and killed upon arriving deep in enemy lines. Or just taking an APC for yourself, leaving half your team to walk, or trying to solo crewman a tank.

Basically, in addition to being more realistic, Squad actually encourages actual cooperation, instead of competition, between players on the same team.

Nearly no one who plays Squad is in it for their personal KDR.

Playing solo is nearly guaranteed to result in you having a bad time, even if you are playing as a sniper, its still usually good practice to either be in communication with other squad leads, be embedded in a squad, or at best be a two man sniper/spotter pair.

Having competent medics and engineers, who do not excel at battle compared to other classes, absolutely can make or break battles.

Squad is about enjoying tense action in a realistic-enough depiction of real world military combat situation, where cooperation is actually quite vital.

At this point its probably clear I am quite the fan of Squad, so at this point I'll let you know that as a one of the earliest beta testers for Project Reality, as well as one of the most prolific posters on the forum, a whole lot of ideas I came up with, or ideas I was very involved in discussing, became many of the core and ancillary gameplay aspects of Project Reality, and nearly all of those have translated over to Squad, and been improved by doing things we dreamed of being able to do but couldn't due to the limitations of the BF2 engine.

So, sure, you can say I am biased, and youre not wrong, but I do also genuinely believe the things I am saying.