Recent reviews by conscript

This game has come a long way since the 2018 release and is now a serious competitor. It's like Battlefield and Call of Duty had a baby. My favorite thing about the game is the movement, modern games are sluggish outside of sprint and this game isn't like that. Mixed with the much faster time to kill it's very engaging. You'll be walking around aiming and leaning a lot.

Some problems
- Audio is bad and can't be used to know your environment. Apparently they know this and are working on it.
- Poor situational awareness mixed with large maps, many windows, and low time to kill kind of sucks. You're pretty much relying on other people getting shot at and dying to know anything. Nobody likes Q spotting, flares, or the minimap revealing players that are shooting, but that sort of thing is necessary.
- strong recoil especially on the first shot makes mitigating cover and leaning with precision too difficult
- 40 players is kind of low for the map size in the conquest mode
- can't customize during a match and customization is still a confusing labyrinth of options.
- looks pretty grindy
- needs a game mode like rush or breakthrough
- publisher has a bad reputation when it comes to free to play games
- RPGs are great for killing infantry

Pros:

Largely surpasses the original and OpenRA except in some notable areas, otherwise has a lot of potential for further development

Cons:

Performance issues such as hitching
Remastered audio is hit and miss in reproducing the old, such as minigunner fire, voice and music is fine though.
Missing some modern RTS features such as rally points, waypoints, etc.


Neither

Sometimes things are lost in translation with loss of quality, others are lost with improvements of quality. Some of the latter is in this game and is unavoidable. While some previously indecipherable sprite animations now make sense, other things like terrain may feel off to some really faithful people

Restored my dad's faith in ARPGs.

Pretty fun game and has a lot of potential. FFA has especially been good. It's a decent addition to the arena FPS genre so far. I think it needs changes though.

Cons:

Very low mobility for an arena fps with hitscan weapons. Can't AD spam at all and can only sprint forwards with weapon down. Sprint should be a key part of fights not how you get to them, like having it as a limited time use in any direction except backwards.

Matches canceling because of a missing player

Very inconsistent TTK with default assault rifle mixed with bad mobility feeds pistol meta. Assault rifle hip fire needs either recoil or accuracy buff to be more competitive at mid-long range and the all-rounder it should be. This could be intended and not a con, I don't know.

Portals only come into play as an escape tactic, which is easy to do with the high TTK so fights can be indecisive outside of close range

4v4 only

Shotgun needs to be adjusted. Instead of being a cheap one shot kill weapon balanced by a really short range of effectiveness, making it a niche gun, it should be viable up to extended ranges and have synergy with a pistol follow-up in order to get the very quick kill.

Plasma rifle muzzle velocity is too slow

Reload times are really slow and it discourages aggressive gameplay

Suggestions:

1. Reduce cone of fire bloom on AR

2. Remove ADAD inertia so players can shake off each other's aim, which is important with hitscan weapons.

3. Rework sprint from a CoD to a Wolfenstein ET implementation, having it speed up fights and letting players do more to outplay each other instead of just getting you around a small map a bit faster

4. Speed up reload times. It's an easy way to help raise the skill cap, so you're not dying because of the long TTK leading up to lacking the ammo to engage the teammate of a player you fragged. As it stands reload times are just a check on good players.

5. Hit sounds like in Quake, it's just satisfying. More announcer lines, like for first kills and killing sprees.

Good game, but gets old very quick thanks to the simplified gameplay developed in response to 'oversaturation' in HOI3. It's like we've gone in the other direction, moving from too steep of a learning curve to gameplay that's too 'flat'. You quickly learn what to expect, whether pursuing alt history or not, and get into a routine. I basically enjoy taking minor powers, abusing excessively abstracted representations of real life mechanics to make them ahistorically powerful, letting the automatically-managed frontlines do their thing, and blobbing from there. This novelty only lasts for so long.

The DLC is near-universally seen as overpriced for the content it offers, and mods are a better alternative to substantiating the vanilla game. Only the latter keeps the sense of novelty going.

Kaiserreich for Darkest Hour has yet to be surpassed, in my opinion.

Fallout 4 represents to me the culmination of a few trends in the gaming industry and the RPG genre that I've been around long enough to see, and I cannot recommend this game because of the direction they've taken during their growth. The RPG aspects are more streamlined and simplified than others in the series and the DLC is disappointing, it's nothing that really extends the game's lifetime and replayability. What actually does so is the modding scene, which has always made Bethesda RPGs much more interesting. Modding has, for the first real time, gone beyond developer endorsement and support through modding tools into integration and paid access.

This development in the history of modding comes as the cost of producing games has increased and developers find innovative ways to offset them, so they naturally capitalize on what's become an asset to Bethesda RPGs. It's yet another unfortunate trend in the industry that shouldn't be condoned, just like microtransactions and DLC, as not all changes during the maturation of a hobby are going to be positive, and they tend to have clear winners and losers. This change, like others, segments more content and the community beyond an array of pay walls, taking us away from the old formula: paying one price for full access and taking a hands-off approach to homebrew changes ('modding') that individuals would make for themselves and end up sharing to the community

The only thing about the game I truly enjoyed was the settlement system, managing a settlement in a post-apocalyptic setting and a first person shooter is pretty enjoyable. It does get stale after a while, and I found Fallout 4's story to be lacking compared to the previous two titles.

It's okay, it's main point for me is that it does a good job at bringing back memories of playing BF1942 singleplayer. It definitely needs time to mature and be polished. I have high hopes for Ravenfield!

The game is really fun but on higher difficulties scrakes and fleshpounds are absolute bullet sponges. With the few perks available there are no counters like KF1's sharpshooter (whose xbow to the head could neutralize a scrake), so some poor soul who grabbed aggro has to 'tank' and die while everyone else bursts it down with regular guns. Kiting is not an option, medics can't heal through the damage, and of course the bezerker can't parry them. No real strategy involved here, and it kind of ruins the fun of dealing with the mass hordes of lesser, stereotypical zombie zeds.

Right now, any of the servers with dozens of people on higher difficulties (suicidal, hell on earth) never reach the boss because it's impossible to beat the scrakes and fleshpounds unless there's just one. Not that the boss would be possible, regardless. Still, the first 4 waves of hundreds of weak zeds with 30 people on the wide open custom maps is a blast.

In its current state it's sort of easy to get burned out on the game, but its very promising and already one of the better co-op shooters. It could just really use mutators to control what zeds spawn, specifically to exclude the elite, bullet-sponge zeds.

I picked this up when it was on sale and I regret it, it's easily the worst Total War of the franchise and some aspects of it pale in comparison to the original Rome Total War. The AI is incredibly awful especially in sieges, and for some reason them sending 1 unit stacks to attack your garrisons isn't uncommon at all. Naval warfare is ruined by transport ships which are superior to any standing navy. The politics make no sense, armies are tied to generals now, turns take ages to go by, all units fight like undisciplined mobs and lose any sense of cohesion and formation from the start of a fight, and late game is incredibly, incredibly boring. On top of this they release with basically mandatory DLC (Greek States DLC is a big middle finger to the fanbase) and soon later an expansion for a $60 beta. CA...give me back my money!

I hope CA can turn this around but it's not looking good. They fixed a lot of serious bugs since release but there's just so much lacking in this game in the core, everything about it screams rushed. The 40% increased budget isn't noticable at all, as the AI that was proclaimed to be seriously invested in just isn't good, and the graphics are nice but don't live up to the promotional pictures from the alpha. With the speed battles take place now there's not really any time to admire them, or the individual fights between units for that matter (not sure why I bought blood and gore DLC honestly)