Recent reviews by OffPhil

Great timewaster, especially considering the cost of admission.

There's a strong incentive to commit suicide if you feel madness closing in on your character, because Experiences (the game's meta-currency) are entirely lost if you die while stark raving mad.
Ten out of ten. Eleven out of ten. Eleventy-one thousand out of ten.

In my very first playthrough, I reported a suspect as armed and dangerous, and lethal force was subsequently authorized. I'd just spent the past half-hour getting to know this person; I was slightly sympathetic to their situation, and I felt physically ill after realizing I might've rubber-stamped their execution without a second thought.
"Just following orders" indeed.

Here's my takeaway:

This game is a good, solid experience. Beautiful visuals, engaging gameplay, and an amazing atmosphere... but from the level of polish, it feels like it should be in an early-access alpha instead of an open beta. Bugs abound, both graphical and gameplay-related, and the content is stretched thin after a few runs. My recommendation to the developers (if they even care to look at a random review on the Internet) would be to polish this up, add some more items, room templates, enemies, et cetera, and then release it to the public.
Then why do I recommend it? Easy: it's free, and it's clearly still in development. If you're looking for a time sink, this game is a pretty good one.

Funny, adrenaline-charged, and surprisingly tactical.

Realism is hard to get right in video games.
You can't have things become too realistic in the wrong places, otherwise it isn't fun. You have to carefully research what reality is like, otherwise you'll get the hollywood version of realism, where everything is defined by what uneducated idiots think is real: the AK-47 is better than the M16 in every way, shotguns are horribly inaccurate outside spitting range, and an unarmored man can take two whole magazines' worth of ammunition before dying.
Then there's Insurgency.
In Insurgency:

• Aiming down iron sights is encouraged because there's no crosshairs otherwise, barring laser sights or tactical lights.
  
• The game tracks the amount of ammunition left in each magazine realistically, and even tracks whether you have a bullet chambered in your gun.
  
• There's no ammo count unless you have a weapon that loads shells/ individually. If you have a magazine-fed weapon, you only know the number of magazines you have left.
  
• Health is handled realistically. Getting hit by a headshot is almost always fatal, but you can survive a bodyshot depending on the weapon, the type of ammunition your enemy has loaded, and whether you have armor or not.
  
• There's no feedback when you kill somebody, so you don't know if they've died, or just dropped prone. In other words, you have to check your kills.
  
• The graphics and audio assets are geared towards aiding immersion rather than making the game look pretty, which is exactly how it should be.

Taken as a whole, Insurgency is more realistic than any AAA titles I've seen, and the few existing inaccuracies are deliberate to preserve balance or pacing.
But suppose you don't care about realism. Suppose you just want a good multiplayer FPS that's cheap, fun, and free of all the bull that AAA titles put you through, e.g. unlocking weapons, DLC map packs, and premium accounts, the stuff that makes a game a test of patience or money rather than skill.
Insurgency can help you out on all three fronts.
TL;DR: If you're looking for a realistic tactical shooter, see you on the battlefield.

Incredible survival game. Unfortunately, it seems that if I get even a little scared my immediate reaction is to turn off the game whilst going "NONONONONONONONO". Maybe somebody with more cojones will get more mileage out of this, because I can't play anything more scary than Darkest Dungeon.

Most innovative shooter I've played in years. Good art style, minimalist mechanics, and very replayable.

Excellent, well-balanced gameplay, an excellent plot that stays in the background unless you wish to find it, good community, frequent updates (for a video game), and HATS. I would have paid $60 for this game...
BUT IT'S FREE.
♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ I love living in the third millenium.
Yes, Valve makes a couple missteps here and there, like drastically overhauling pubs and making one weapon or another OP as hell now and then, but these are always fixed and Valve always brings in new content.
If you're thinking about getting this game, then do it. You will not regret it.
Just do me a couple favors:
Try to find out how the game works. At least learn the basics of each class, who counters what, and the basics of each map and game mode. Training mode is made for this.
Try out new stuff once in a while. Weapons, playstyles, classes, anything.
Don't "main" anything. If you're not playing all the classes, you're not experiencing all the game has to offer.
Keep going, even if it seems like you'll never get good at the game. Practice makes perfect.
Always accept help. There's a lot of nice people on the internet, despite what it may seem.
Remember that it's just a game. It's not worth getting worked up over.

This is written from the average TF2 player's perspective, and NOT mine.
Pros:
Not as inaccessible as many people would have you believe.
Very fast-paced.
Same nine classes.
Most classes have some sort of mobility ability. The only ones that don't are the Heavy, the Engineer and the Sniper.
With a lot of skill, you can speedrun that ♥♥♥♥♥.
Tutorial teaches you the basics of speedrunning that ♥♥♥♥♥.
Every class gets grenades. Most classes get special grenades.
Cons:
No hats.
No loadouts.
Speedrunning that ♥♥♥♥♥ is extremely hard.
The community isn't active all the time.