Noob Review: Red Alert, Berkshire

[noctu]

Yesterday (27/6/21) I met up with some friends at Red Alert in Berkshire (https://redalertpaintball.co.uk/) for a bit of toy soldier action. They've attended the site a few times in the past, but it was my first time (and in fact my first time doing proper airsoft).

 

The site costs 27.50 for general usage, but site membership (25 quid a year) gives you a 10% discount and a Red Alert patch. For rental players, it'll be 50 quid instead. The rental guns were all the same (an Ares Amoeba Mutant AMM9), with single high cap magazine. This used to include unlimited BBs, but due to people "taking the piss" and running back to the safe zone to refill a high cap magazine multiple times per game it now comes with a bottle of BBs instead. This is a bit better for social distancing purposes as well, as the previous fill method was essentially a single shared bucket. Absolutely no complaints with the gun, it had clearly been well looked after and shot well.

 

The weather for most of the day was a warm 19-ish degrees, and very humid. Rain threatened for most of the day but didn't really pick up until about 4 in the afternoon. As far as I could tell, the player dressed as Tinky Winky only lasted one game in costume with this humidity.

 

The site itself is 35 acres, mostly woodland but with a good variety of man made structures dotted around the place - I believe we used the majority of them across the day. There aren't too many drastic elevation changes, but half of the site is a large slope which is perfect for anyone that enjoys games that involve attacking up a hill. It's all very green at the moment, so away from the man made structures there were plenty of dense fern patches.

 

I arrived at about 8:45 to a half full car park. There is a safe zone attached to the car park, but it's not the biggest, so the majority of players set up out of their cars on the day. For part of the day there was also a kid's paintball party taking place, but they had a separate area of the safe zone assigned to them and things were timed so that they didn't get too scared by the nasty airsofters. The main airsoft safety brief was given via megaphone in the car park, and was clear and concise and sprinkled with a little bit of humour. The site allows full auto, but only in three to five round bursts. No blind fire (obviously), no firing through gaps in structures smaller than an A4 sheet. I was a dirty rental so didn't have to worry about chrono, but on site chrono is mandatory and done with both .2's and the ammo you'll be firing. On .2's the limits are 350fps, 420 (or 425, the site is unclear) for DMRs with a 20m MED and 500 for bolt actions with a 30m MED. There's a dedicated chrono area, but I also saw some taking place on entry to the game areas.

 

There are two site shops. The main site shop sells your standard attachments, BBs, patches, drinks and miscellaneous stuff, whilst the other is a second hand shop and had a good array of pre owned guns, clothing, and all sorts of goodies. A couple of guys from my group picked up some new (old) RIFs to use on the day - one of the guys that did this was a rental like me, but they happily shifted over the extra amount he'd paid for the rental to a membership instead.

 

We had a few late entries - traffic on the M4 was particularly shite this weekend.

 

The briefing was scheduled to take place at about 10 AM, and the morning's games followed.

 

Games:

 

Teams are left arm yellow/right arm red. We were on yellow.

 

First game was a warm up game slated to last 30 minutes, with a fairly standard 3 point Domination game. This took place across three game areas - the Town, Bridge and Village. The Town is, as the name suggests, an area of many structures and old cars. The town features a large "Embassy" building that could provide some good CQB, the Bridge is, er, a bridge over a river, and the village... I didn't actually get down to the village end in this game but I'm willing to bet it involves some structures. Most of my time was spent defending the Embassy as it had a clear view over the town's capture point, but the enemy team didn't push it and just shot at it from the bushes instead.

 

Game finished, everyone tramped back to the car park to reload and mill around for a while.

 

The second and third games were "D-Day", which was a "Rush" type game. The attacking team initially spawned at a landing craft in a wet area at the bottom of the site's main hill. The attackers had to push up through a series of bunkers and then take a man made metal fort at the top, with infinite lives. The defenders had one life per bunker spawn, and two at the fort. As the attackers took bunkers their spawn moved up with them. The game ended when the fort was clear of defenders. There was a 45 minute time limit for this game.

 

This is unsurprisingly a tough game for the attackers, especially with the slogging up and down the hill from spawn on being hit. Our team attacked first and finished in 30 minutes, no doubt helped by our team's LMG who fired off about a few thousand rounds in this game alone.

 

After the second game finished, everyone tramped back to the car park to reload and mill around for a while. There was some grumbling about being hungry as by this time it was about 12:30 and the smell of lunch was in the air, but we went back out to do our team's D-Day defence first. The food should have been a good incentive for the attacking team to push through quickly (we did consider just dying so we could eat), but they completed in 35 minutes so the yellow team won overall.

 

Game finished, everyone tramped back to the car park to reload and mill around for a while and finally eat at about 2.

 

Lunch!

 

The food was decent - there was a big pan of curry on the go, and burgers & veggie burgers were available. During the briefing earlier in the day they'd also checked for any dietary requirements that needed catering for. Lunch took around 45 minutes, either by design or the fact the queue for the curry went all the way through the safe zone and out into the car park.

 

The car park thinned out slightly before the start of afternoon play as the sky had threatened to do that rain thing.

 

The afternoon's game was a game of "Follow the Colours", which was effectively just a pair of opposing moving spawns. Every time someone on the defending team died their spawn (a marshal with a hat on) would take two steps towards their end of the field, whilst the spawn for the attacking team would move up to be in line with the rearmost attacker.  Once the defending spawn reached the end of the play area it was removed (the marshal took his hat off). The play area for this game was a long, curving banana rectangle that lead from an area of woodland, through the town, down a hill and to a radio tower. The defenders initially spawned on the near end of the town to the attacker. I believe this game was meant to take 45 minutes each way.

 

This game mode had a few issues, partly due to player behaviour.

 

The intention was clearly that the defending team would move forward from their spawn and try to prevent the attackers from advancing in the woodland area before the town, but they... didn't. Instead, they all fell back into the town area behind their spawn and let the attackers claim nearly a third of the game area right from the get go. I believe the marshal that represented their spawn chose to skip back a few steps at this point! Pushing into the town was hard work as by this time of afternoon the "short bursts" rule for full auto appeared to have been entirely forgotten. A number of the defenders were lying behind clumps of bushes and just filling the air with plastic in the general direction of the attackers, through more bushes (aside from one bloke who was doing it by poking his gun out through the bars of the "jail" in the town and firing merrily away. Eventually, someone got a grenade in there for him.). Because of the initial push by the attackers being uncontested, the spawns ended up so close to each other that the attackers had to pause and have their spawn move temporarily into cover to prevent spawning players getting shot straight away. By this time the defender's spawn was on a track that cut through the whole game zone; we were told not to shoot players on the track as they were dead and walking back to spawn, but they were also shooting at us at the same time so something had clearly got lost in translation somewhere. I found one red player had merrily walked all the way up the track, cut into the game zone, and started shooting into our spawn from behind, but when confronted said "oh no I'm going to the safe zone". The yellow team cleared the embassy about five times, but I'm not convinced that after the first time there were any players other than yellow in it.

 

The attacking team eventually pushed the defenders back far enough and took the point.

 

Round one of the game finished, everyone tramped back to the car park to reload and mill around for a while before switching sides.

 

By this point the rain had started in earnest and there were quite a few people from the attacking team feeling grumpy about taking so much full auto fire at close range. The marshals were having a chat about it when I walked past, though I'm not sure if there was any resolution.

 

It was about 4PM at this point and we'd played 4 games (at least, some of us had, given the late arrivals). The rest of my group decided to call it a day, and by all appearances so did a number of other players from the yellow team. Apparently the red team won the last game, but by that time we were gone.

 

(totally not stealing the below format here)

 

Good

 

The team of marshals were great, very approachable and friendly but not averse to taking someone aside for a quick chat.

 

Rentals were high quality and shot in the direction the gun was pointed.

 

Good variety of stuff on sale in the shops.

 

Food - a curry is always a good thing in my books, and a few people proclaimed it good enough that they'd go back for seconds.

 

The clientele were a mix of age ranges from the young to the, er, grizzled. About ten were rentals. In the most part they were very friendly (the guy with the LMG let me hold his very large and very heavy weapon), but see hit taking below.

 

The playing area had a good amount of man made structures, trenches, bunkers, etc. to get involved with along with the normal woodland features.

 

Average

 

Access road is bumpy sand/gravel to a spacious car park. It's well sign posted and there's a 5mph limit for a reason - some of the divots in the access road are quite deep.

 

Toilets were a couple of portaloos, one male, one female. They were regularly wiped down and seemed in good enough state.

 

Turn around time wasn't fantastic, on average we'd be in the car park for 20 minutes between games and then sat around in the game zone for another ten to fifteen minutes waiting for the stragglers to turn up.

 

Meh

 

Hit taking from a few people. Over the course of two games I heard one player in particular being complained about, by experienced players, with the complaint progressing from "I had to mag dump the twunt to get him to admit it" in the first instance to "we both had to do it this time" in the second.

 

Few instances of full autoing blindly through bushes and through small gaps.

 

Injury of the day

 

In the last game we played Me Mate Dave took a burst of full auto to the face at very close range and now has a very impressive welt on the inside edge of the bridge of his nose, about half an inch from his eye. He says he'll be buying full goggles rather than shooting glasses style for next time.

 

End

 

In conclusion, I definitely had a fun time and would happily go back (also, UKARA reasons), but some of my group didn't enjoy it quite as much as usual. This probably wasn't helped by the excessive humidity at the start of the day and the drizzle at the end, but that's English weather for you.

 

[EDcase]

Good review 👍

Obviously things will change from day to day so It'll be interesting to read your overall review after the three game days.

 

Once you have UKARA, I can also recommend Skirmish Wycombe which would be a bit closer to you.

[noctu]

30 minutes ago, EDcase said:

Good review 👍

Obviously things will change from day to day so It'll be interesting to read your overall review after the three game days.

 

Good shout, I'll add to this one after I've done the visits.

 

In the mean time I'll see if I can get my sweaty mitts on a different RIF to use next time, and possibly some anti fog stuff for my goggles as with the humidity it was like playing underwater at some points.

[EDcase]

Yeah, I'd say fogging is the biggest problem for airsofters.

CatCrap (worst name ever) is quite good

Edited June 28, 2021 by EDcase

[Shamal]

7 hours ago, noctu said:

Yesterday (27/6/21) I met up with some friends at Red Alert in Berkshire (https://redalertpaintball.co.uk/) for a bit of toy soldier action. They've attended the site a few times in the past, but it was my first time (and in fact my first time doing proper airsoft).

 

The site costs 27.50 for general usage, but site membership (25 quid a year) gives you a 10% discount and a Red Alert patch. For rental players, it'll be 50 quid instead. The rental guns were all the same (an Ares Amoeba Mutant AMM9), with single high cap magazine. This used to include unlimited BBs, but due to people "taking the piss" and running back to the safe zone to refill a high cap magazine multiple times per game it now comes with a bottle of BBs instead. This is a bit better for social distancing purposes as well, as the previous fill method was essentially a single shared bucket. Absolutely no complaints with the gun, it had clearly been well looked after and shot well.

 

The weather for most of the day was a warm 19-ish degrees, and very humid. Rain threatened for most of the day but didn't really pick up until about 4 in the afternoon. As far as I could tell, the player dressed as Tinky Winky only lasted one game in costume with this humidity.

 

The site itself is 35 acres, mostly woodland but with a good variety of man made structures dotted around the place - I believe we used the majority of them across the day. There aren't too many drastic elevation changes, but half of the site is a large slope which is perfect for anyone that enjoys games that involve attacking up a hill. It's all very green at the moment, so away from the man made structures there were plenty of dense fern patches.

 

I arrived at about 8:45 to a half full car park. There is a safe zone attached to the car park, but it's not the biggest, so the majority of players set up out of their cars on the day. For part of the day there was also a kid's paintball party taking place, but they had a separate area of the safe zone assigned to them and things were timed so that they didn't get too scared by the nasty airsofters. The main airsoft safety brief was given via megaphone in the car park, and was clear and concise and sprinkled with a little bit of humour. The site allows full auto, but only in three to five round bursts. No blind fire (obviously), no firing through gaps in structures smaller than an A4 sheet. I was a dirty rental so didn't have to worry about chrono, but on site chrono is mandatory and done with both .2's and the ammo you'll be firing. On .2's the limits are 350fps, 420 (or 425, the site is unclear) for DMRs with a 20m MED and 500 for bolt actions with a 30m MED. There's a dedicated chrono area, but I also saw some taking place on entry to the game areas.

 

There are two site shops. The main site shop sells your standard attachments, BBs, patches, drinks and miscellaneous stuff, whilst the other is a second hand shop and had a good array of pre owned guns, clothing, and all sorts of goodies. A couple of guys from my group picked up some new (old) RIFs to use on the day - one of the guys that did this was a rental like me, but they happily shifted over the extra amount he'd paid for the rental to a membership instead.

 

We had a few late entries - traffic on the M4 was particularly shite this weekend.

 

The briefing was scheduled to take place at about 10 AM, and the morning's games followed.

 

Games:

 

Teams are left arm yellow/right arm red. We were on yellow.

 

First game was a warm up game slated to last 30 minutes, with a fairly standard 3 point Domination game. This took place across three game areas - the Town, Bridge and Village. The Town is, as the name suggests, an area of many structures and old cars. The town features a large "Embassy" building that could provide some good CQB, the Bridge is, er, a bridge over a river, and the village... I didn't actually get down to the village end in this game but I'm willing to bet it involves some structures. Most of my time was spent defending the Embassy as it had a clear view over the town's capture point, but the enemy team didn't push it and just shot at it from the bushes instead.

 

Game finished, everyone tramped back to the car park to reload and mill around for a while.

 

The second and third games were "D-Day", which was a "Rush" type game. The attacking team initially spawned at a landing craft in a wet area at the bottom of the site's main hill. The attackers had to push up through a series of bunkers and then take a man made metal fort at the top, with infinite lives. The defenders had one life per bunker spawn, and two at the fort. As the attackers took bunkers their spawn moved up with them. The game ended when the fort was clear of defenders. There was a 45 minute time limit for this game.

 

This is unsurprisingly a tough game for the attackers, especially with the slogging up and down the hill from spawn on being hit. Our team attacked first and finished in 30 minutes, no doubt helped by our team's LMG who fired off about a few thousand rounds in this game alone.

 

After the second game finished, everyone tramped back to the car park to reload and mill around for a while. There was some grumbling about being hungry as by this time it was about 12:30 and the smell of lunch was in the air, but we went back out to do our team's D-Day defence first. The food should have been a good incentive for the attacking team to push through quickly (we did consider just dying so we could eat), but they completed in 35 minutes so the yellow team won overall.

 

Game finished, everyone tramped back to the car park to reload and mill around for a while and finally eat at about 2.

 

Lunch!

 

The food was decent - there was a big pan of curry on the go, and burgers & veggie burgers were available. During the briefing earlier in the day they'd also checked for any dietary requirements that needed catering for. Lunch took around 45 minutes, either by design or the fact the queue for the curry went all the way through the safe zone and out into the car park.

 

The car park thinned out slightly before the start of afternoon play as the sky had threatened to do that rain thing.

 

The afternoon's game was a game of "Follow the Colours", which was effectively just a pair of opposing moving spawns. Every time someone on the defending team died their spawn (a marshal with a hat on) would take two steps towards their end of the field, whilst the spawn for the attacking team would move up to be in line with the rearmost attacker.  Once the defending spawn reached the end of the play area it was removed (the marshal took his hat off). The play area for this game was a long, curving banana rectangle that lead from an area of woodland, through the town, down a hill and to a radio tower. The defenders initially spawned on the near end of the town to the attacker. I believe this game was meant to take 45 minutes each way.

 

This game mode had a few issues, partly due to player behaviour.

 

The intention was clearly that the defending team would move forward from their spawn and try to prevent the attackers from advancing in the woodland area before the town, but they... didn't. Instead, they all fell back into the town area behind their spawn and let the attackers claim nearly a third of the game area right from the get go. I believe the marshal that represented their spawn chose to skip back a few steps at this point! Pushing into the town was hard work as by this time of afternoon the "short bursts" rule for full auto appeared to have been entirely forgotten. A number of the defenders were lying behind clumps of bushes and just filling the air with plastic in the general direction of the attackers, through more bushes (aside from one bloke who was doing it by poking his gun out through the bars of the "jail" in the town and firing merrily away. Eventually, someone got a grenade in there for him.). Because of the initial push by the attackers being uncontested, the spawns ended up so close to each other that the attackers had to pause and have their spawn move temporarily into cover to prevent spawning players getting shot straight away. By this time the defender's spawn was on a track that cut through the whole game zone; we were told not to shoot players on the track as they were dead and walking back to spawn, but they were also shooting at us at the same time so something had clearly got lost in translation somewhere. I found one red player had merrily walked all the way up the track, cut into the game zone, and started shooting into our spawn from behind, but when confronted said "oh no I'm going to the safe zone". The yellow team cleared the embassy about five times, but I'm not convinced that after the first time there were any players other than yellow in it.

 

The attacking team eventually pushed the defenders back far enough and took the point.

 

Round one of the game finished, everyone tramped back to the car park to reload and mill around for a while before switching sides.

 

By this point the rain had started in earnest and there were quite a few people from the attacking team feeling grumpy about taking so much full auto fire at close range. The marshals were having a chat about it when I walked past, though I'm not sure if there was any resolution.

 

It was about 4PM at this point and we'd played 4 games (at least, some of us had, given the late arrivals). The rest of my group decided to call it a day, and by all appearances so did a number of other players from the yellow team. Apparently the red team won the last game, but by that time we were gone.

 

(totally not stealing the below format here)

 

Good

 

The team of marshals were great, very approachable and friendly but not averse to taking someone aside for a quick chat.

 

Rentals were high quality and shot in the direction the gun was pointed.

 

Good variety of stuff on sale in the shops.

 

Food - a curry is always a good thing in my books, and a few people proclaimed it good enough that they'd go back for seconds.

 

The clientele were a mix of age ranges from the young to the, er, grizzled. About ten were rentals. In the most part they were very friendly (the guy with the LMG let me hold his very large and very heavy weapon), but see hit taking below.

 

The playing area had a good amount of man made structures, trenches, bunkers, etc. to get involved with along with the normal woodland features.

 

Average

 

Access road is bumpy sand/gravel to a spacious car park. It's well sign posted and there's a 5mph limit for a reason - some of the divots in the access road are quite deep.

 

Toilets were a couple of portaloos, one male, one female. They were regularly wiped down and seemed in good enough state.

 

Turn around time wasn't fantastic, on average we'd be in the car park for 20 minutes between games and then sat around in the game zone for another ten to fifteen minutes waiting for the stragglers to turn up.

 

Meh

 

Hit taking from a few people. Over the course of two games I heard one player in particular being complained about, by experienced players, with the complaint progressing from "I had to mag dump the twunt to get him to admit it" in the first instance to "we both had to do it this time" in the second.

 

Few instances of full autoing blindly through bushes and through small gaps.

 

Injury of the day

 

In the last game we played Me Mate Dave took a burst of full auto to the face at very close range and now has a very impressive welt on the inside edge of the bridge of his nose, about half an inch from his eye. He says he'll be buying full goggles rather than shooting glasses style for next time.

 

End

 

In conclusion, I definitely had a fun time and would happily go back (also, UKARA reasons), but some of my group didn't enjoy it quite as much as usual. This probably wasn't helped by the excessive humidity at the start of the day and the drizzle at the end, but that's English weather for you.

 

Fuck! Are you a writer or just got too much time on your hands lol.

I had to pop out and get me hair cut halfway through 😄

Good work though👍

Regards 

[evilcheesepuff]

On 28/06/2021 at 12:36, noctu said:

 

Good shout, I'll add to this one after I've done the visits.

 

In the mean time I'll see if I can get my sweaty mitts on a different RIF to use next time, and possibly some anti fog stuff for my goggles as with the humidity it was like playing underwater at some points.

I'v e got a few things if you need to borrow something interesting for a game if we are at the same site.

[PureSilver]

On 28/06/2021 at 10:37, noctu said:

In the last game we played Me Mate Dave took a burst of full auto to the face at very close range and now has a very impressive welt on the inside edge of the bridge of his nose, about half an inch from his eye. He says he'll be buying full goggles rather than shooting glasses style for next time.

 

Your Mate Dave was allowed to play without full-seal eye protection? You should add that to the "Meh" section, or maybe add a "Seriously Completely Pants-On-Head Retarded" section to put it in. You don't have to attend Absolute Airsoft to lose an eye (although it helps).

[noctu]

On 14/07/2021 at 11:54, PureSilver said:

 

Your Mate Dave was allowed to play without full-seal eye protection? You should add that to the "Meh" section, or maybe add a "Seriously Completely Pants-On-Head Retarded" section to put it in. You don't have to attend Absolute Airsoft to lose an eye (although it helps).

 

There wasn't any danger of it actually reaching his eye from there as he was wearing decent eyepro (and they do insist upon it), I was just describing the position as being probably the unluckiest place to take a round as that bit of his nose was the only uncovered bit of his face. I'm expecting a full Mandalorian style mask next time