Best VPNs for Squad in 2022
A tactical first-person shooter game, Squad, was released on Steam in 2015 as a Steam Early Access feature. Canadian Studio Offworld Industries developed this game and made it only available on PC. You will find both the essence of an arcade shooter game and a military setting. Its predecessor, Project Reality, inspired it to follow the mechanism to focus on communication and teamwork throughout the gameplay. You have to build firebases, defensive constructions and become embroiled in arms combat as you find a range of vehicles like Tanks, Infantry Fighting Vehicle, Mine-resistant Ambush Protected tactical vehicles, big helicopters inside the large game map. You can play as British Army, US Army, Russian Ground Forces, and you will also find some insurgent groups and militia groups as well.
Well, the points above pretty much sum up the gameplay mechanism, but as you choose to play a multiplayer game, you encounter lag. Using a VPN thus can help you get past those servers with the crowd and choose a server where the footfall is fewer. From that note, in the following section, we discuss the necessity of using a VPN if you play Squad.
The reason behind using a VPN to play Squad
The first thing that comes to your mind whenever someone utters VPN is privacy and protection on the internet. But is that all a VPN offers? Our findings and research convinced us otherwise. Because as casual and lightweight privacy sounds, it is just as crucial and necessary a tool to save your hard-earned money from getting wasted. Apart from protecting us, a VPN gives us more capacity to play games or use the internet. Below are some quick points you may check to understand more.
Vulnerabilities are always there:
You can’t wait for someone to become hell-bent on compromising you and then take measures to guard your activity. Once someone has enough money and time to invest in the effort, any seemingly impossible tasks can be done. Likewise, if you are a little paranoid and use a VPN, we tell you that little paranoia won’t hurt. Instead, it would protect you in those unprecedented circumstances. We live in an age of mass surveillance, and misappropriation of your data without your permission is no longer a myth. Using a VPN makes us less susceptible to such attempts. Even if the scammers, advertisers, fraudsters target you, the VPN in your system will make their job quite difficult. It doesn’t matter how twisted your passwords are. They will find a way to crack it once they identify your location and system information.
Going through a secret tunnel:
None of us can deny the drop in download and upload speeds while using a VPN due to its prompt via multiple channels. In this era of multitasking and rush, we can’t afford to invest the entire system in one server while other commitments remain due. That is why VPNs that offer this feature of allowing only your chosen apps through the tunnel stand out.
Your chosen apps will run on the private network, whereas your work-related applications will stay unperturbed. Likewise, when you are engaged playing Squad using the VPN’s network, you don’t have to worry about those work emails notifying you of the updates.
But here is what you should keep in mind – if you choose the split tunneling feature, you refuse to protect the entire system because of those exempted applications running on the local network. However, it is not like once you use the split tunneling feature, you have to keep using it permanently. This feature is a need of the hour, and you can switch back to encrypting the entire system at any time.
The freebies and your attention to them:
We all love freebies, and in life, we barely encounter something which is free of cost. But when it comes to free VPNs, it is not that rare a sight. There are a few free VPNs out there offering quite a good service with or without some tradeoffs. Most free VPNs put restrictions on the bandwidth, but a considerable number of the rest don’t.
ProtonVPN, in our opinion, stands out on the front as a free VPN service provider.
While paid ones do not necessarily put a dent in your packet in all cases, most offers a free trial period of at least a week to try them first before you invest your money. Our suggestion is to aim for the longer-term plans to save more on your purchase and ease the burden on your wallet.
Still, it is wise to check their services and features before deciding.
You can easily use some DIY skills and configure your router to use the VPN service on all of your devices connected to it.
Another exciting thing is the VPN protocols used in the VPN service. Make sure the protocols are security wise up to date and modern in style, e.g. OpenVPN etc.
Lastly, we focus on the number of servers offered. We check whether the locations of those servers are widely distributed all across the globe.
We are aware of those speed loss rumors:
Often we hear rumors about the dip in the internet speed while using a VPN. We are not totally rejecting that notion because we know the probability of that happening. Also, we are aware of the technicality behind it.
If we break down the cause, you will understand better. VPNs channelize our web traffic through an extra physical distance and machines. It happens due to its aim of anonymizing our identity online.
To tackle this issue, make sure to choose a VPN server location close to your physical location and the game servers.
A guide to picking the best VPN for the game:
If we pick up from where we left off, going over our earlier discussions, we can elucidate some of the fine points to add to our priority list. We have been looking for speed and privacy both at the same time. The VPN servers ought to make their presence in the key regions all around the globe to deliver the best possible speeds. Having a wide range of servers will also address the frequent disconnect issue. So, that leaves us with the epiphany that we should choose a VPN with the most server count.
Next, we worry about our privacy, and that redirects our attention to the security and privacy features of the VPN. If we look into the encryption models used by the VPNs, we will have a good idea of how secure we are using those VPNs. While we brainstorm about the encryption features, we also have to make sure if those features can stop DDoS attacks.
Now that we know where to look to ensure our security let’s turn our heads to privacy. As we use a VPN service, we often give it permission to store, use and modify our data. VPNs that come with a no-logs policy thus stand out. Even if a VPN service is claiming a no-logs policy, we still need to check it twice to confirm its claim these days. VPNs that don’t keep our IP address and the usage information like browsing history are our priority choices.
ExpressVPN:
Spread across 94 countries with around 3000+ servers, ExpressVPN earned the top spot on our list. It supports up to 5-devices with one subscription on all platforms like Windows, Android, Mac, iOS, Linux, Xbox and PlayStation. Being in an advantageous position, with its wide range of servers, users can rest assured about a stable connection with decent speed. We tested it on the go as we travelled to some countries to check its performance. The good news is that we didn’t find any considerable difference in performance. Now you no longer have to worry about those high ping rates as ExpressVPN proved to be a reliable option in this domain.
However, the pricing of this VPN service may seems you hight but using ExpressVPN coupon code you can also solve this issue.
Another concern we looked at was the security aspect of the VPN. The military-grade encryption in ExpressVPN keeps all those fierce DDoS attacks at bay.
If we talk about its native application on platforms like Android, iOS, PC, the installation process is pretty easy, even for beginners.
The quality of the application makes ExpressVPN claim further rights over its authority in the market. If we talk about its application for PlayStations and the Xbox series, the online guide is sufficient for anyone to get going.
Gamers don’t always play games for their entertainment and look for some exclusive streaming content for a change. If that is the case, you will be delighted to know that ExpressVPN has its forte in this genre. With ExpressVPN at your disposal, you can unlock those geo-restricted content from popular streaming websites like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu etc.
Coming to your impression while making the purchase, we know that the monthly plan of ExpressVPN looks costlier than other VPNs in the market. That is why we dug deep and found that the 1-year subscription of ExpressVPN is the most affordable compared to that of other leading VPN services.
ExpressVPN offers 3-months of additional service if one purchases the yearly plan. Still, if you have apprehension, the 30-days full refund guarantee is the cherry on top.
Surfshark:
Surfshark has more than 1700 servers ranging across 63 countries, which, we admit, is lower than ExpressVPN. But still, it is a decent number of servers out there enough to cater to our gaming needs.
If you are not a streamer and upload speeds are not on the list of your key priority, then Surfshark is quite a good option for your Squad gameplay. Surfshark offers good speed with low ping output, and we found that deal pretty good. We excluded streamers, keeping in mind that Surfshark is not good at upload speeds. Surfshark is straightforward with some neat features like Kill switch to take care of your privacy during the events of an accidental connection drop.
Kill Switch disables your internet connection if the VPN fails to maintain the link with the targetted server. Even if it is a matter of a second that the VPN connection gets shaky, Surfshark immediately shuts down the internet connection so that your IP address doesn’t get vulnerable. There is a dedicated “Whitelist” option to shield your banking apps to take care of your woes. On top of that, Surfshark gives a strict no-logs policy which it lives up to, as we found out in our testing.
We won’t miss the chance to tell you the unlimited device usage aspect of Surfshark with just a single Surfshark user account.
For those who love torrenting, Surfshark will disappoint you as it doesn’t work well with torrent applications. Therefore, readers who fall in this category may need to look elsewhere to reap that benefit. Surfshark is undoubtedly the most affordable option, among the ones we tested for Squad gameplay on the pricing front. We loved Surfshark, knowing that the unlimited device access feature translates to a competitive pricing structure.
NordVPN:
NordVPN has more than 5700 servers in around 59 countries, allowing a maximum of 6 devices from one registered account. If you are wondering why you should use NordVPN, let us tell you that NordVPN allows a great download and upload speed. NordVPN uses WireGuard VPN protocol which is the latest version these days. So, the poor ping performance no longer will hinder your online gaming performance.
The only downside we found was the frequent update prompts which sometimes can make users feel irritated.
If we compare NordVPN with our previous mention, i.e. Surfshark, we put Surfshark ahead of NordVPN because of the former’s provision of allowing unlimited devices from one registration. That is the area that gives Surfshark an edge over all other leading VPN services available in the market at present.
However, while playing Squad, you may put all your focus on the speed of the connection. We understand that valid concern, so our next point will surely fetch a smile on our readers’ faces as NordVPN dominates when it comes to download and upload speeds. NordVPN indeed takes the crown even when upload speed is concerned. Our emphasis on upload speed stems from the findings that most of our researched VPNs led us to encounter a considerable drop in upload speed.
Delivering both security and privacy deserves applause from all of us, including our readers, that we are indeed sure. NordVPN brings DNS security that prevents any attempt to leak your location data. We ran some tests to verify the claim with the help of independent sites to check for possible DNS leaks. To our surprise, NordVPN came with flying colours. NordVPN also comes with a no-logging policy, and we found no false claim there as well.
As other independent auditors also looked into the privacy features offered by NordVPN, we were all ready to jump into another interest – Streaming. Before you ask why gamers will consider this feature, we want to add that NordVPN doesn’t miss out on the bonuses that some other VPNs offer to their users.
NordVPN excels here too because it gives users access to all major streaming platforms – Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, BBC iPlayer etc. It allows users to access Netflix libraries of other countries with ease.
Talking about content, if you have been disappointed so far seeing that the major VPN service providers underperform in torrenting, here is NordVPN putting all those woes at bay. While the likes of Surfshark disrupts your torrenting aspirations, let alone improve the experience, Nord protects all your torrent activity as you download contents like games, movies, TV shows using torrent applications.
Let us know if you get the results:
We didn’t bombard you with lots of choices. Our brainstorming narrowed down the best three we could ever come up with, analyzing whether they checked all the essential boxes. These three names gave satisfaction to us during our testing, and so may happen to our readers as they pay heed to our recommendations. Don’t forget to send us your feedback upon using one of those VPN softwares while playing Squad. We are confident that our fellow readers will have a wonderful experience getting rid of those prolonged issues.