Recent reviews by Nikamew

gud with muds

I'm always extremely sceptical when people with enormous playtimes leave negative reviews on games, but this one sadly deserves it. I've wasted nearly 6000 hours of my life playing Garry's Mod. More time than most people will probably invest in all of their hobbies combined in their entire lives. I had a legitimate, serious addiction to this game that derailed my studies, jeopardised my professional and personal life, and led to so many sleepless nights of being unable to extricate myself from its clutches that I've likely lost hundreds of hours of sleep because of it, with an unclear but definite impact upon my health.

And for what? It made me totally miserable. Almost every server is guaranteed to have randomkilling, cheating, abysmal balancing, screaming manchildren, deliberately emptying their parent's bank accounts for guns, or all of the above. It is by far the most horrifically toxic "community" I've seen in a game. Having grown up in an era before heavy internet moderation and service centralisation, I'd like to think my skin is thick as stone, but the extreme banality of servers and high stakes gamemodes mean that every mistake infringed upon you feels brutal. This game evokes an ugly rage in me that no other one does. Being at the near-total mercy of strangers is simply an absolute nightmare, where in Battlefront or Call of Duty I can single-handedly carry an entire team, but in Garry's Mod I'm subject to the whims of strangers who overwhelmingly refuse to act as a decent human being. The vast majority of players never communicate, particularly maddening and screaming in chat, and a plurality of those people then go on to engage in the abysmal mistreatment I previously listed. I struggle to describe how angry this game makes me because of the people who play it. As a game in a void, with its mechanics safe from misuse or abandonment, it's a brilliant, deep, ever-evolving network of strategies and counter-strategies, as immensely tense as it is rewarding. But with players added into the mix, it's miserable, despicable, infuriating, and gets the worst out of me and clearly a huge amount of others too, based on the narrative of toxicity that has shadowed the game for half a decade.

I haven't been able to recommend Garry's Mod for years. I stopped playing seriously around a year ago, and occasionally dipped my toes in only to stop again. But I recently gave it one last go, and noticed a huge drop in my mood, as the mounting frustrations of strangers who are either ignorant or deliberately antisocial in their destructive tendencies that I can only describe as a form of sociopathy magnified by the protection of online anonimity. It took mere hours of being exposed to endless random killings and chat abuse to feel stress intense enough to physically manifest. And that's to say nothing of the torrent of racist, sexist, and other -ist abuse one will encounter more often than tactical call outs or strategic planning. This "community", a term I use almost sarcastically at this stage, is simply unsalvageable. It is so far the worst I have encountered in my two decades of gaming. There is no way around it. And in Garry's eternal wisdom of turning it into a hyper-competitive esports contender, the worst of the worst are drawn to its stench like flies to dung, a string of insecure teenage boys and socially rejected manbabies whose sole purpose in life is to veer between desperate tactics ranging from exploiting bugs to cheating, to "trolling" - i.e., to inflict as much misery as possible unto others. What makes all of this even worse is that I feel humiliated in my inability to control my fury when experiencing the stupidity or malice that permeates almost every match, but it's easy to say "it's just a game!" when you're not the one who is constantly trying to be as good a teammate as possible, always healing, always placing the resupply box, always backing others up, always trying to cade and protect and empower allies in any way possible, only to have your efforts frustrated by a parade of angry sociopaths and possibly literal children abdicating all shared responsibility for a good time to inflate their fragile egos via failed attempts at chasing high pointsgame. It's the equivalent of trying to play football, only for the ten teammates to pass the ball to the opponent, or kick you in the shins, or simply walk off the field and abandon the game if they fail to score a goal, leaving you to pick up the pieces. And sure, you could just quit and find a new server to play with, but what if most servers were like that? But you want to play football, right, so what do you do? You have to keep trying, but every time you do, you're almost guaranteed to have a teammate sprint towards you and elbow you in the face before deliberately scoring an own-goal and then leaving, so then what? It's horrible. And it's the same in all gamemodes, in every server, at all times of day, and trust me that in my 6000 hours I have tried every possible setup to find a worthwhile environment. The people who play this game are by and large the worst gaming has to offer, a reflection of the hostile antipathy afforded by today's social media platforms rolled into an environment where you can't block the trolls but are instead forced to endure them if you want to experience the game, eternally hoping "maybe this will finally be a good server", but being proven wrong nine out of ten times.

Finally, and to no surprise to anyone, Garry's Mod employs every manipulative tactic game designers have thought of to prey on vulnerable people like myself and actively foster addiction and more spending. Servers monetise virtually everything possible: Season passes, battle passes with multiple tiers, uniforms, animations, OP weapons, weapon skins, and of course, loot boxes, and many of these skins and package contents are limited to specific events or seasons, pressuring you further than the social insecurity inherently built into a system that encourages you to spend money to do good. It has multiple in-game economies and heavily promotes spending real cash to buy the premium one, which can also be exchanged for time-limited boosters which, as you might imagine, continue to tick away even when you're not playing. Garry pulls every slimy trick to get you hooked and spending. Its interface encourages you to keep playing and playing and playing, and the format of its matches means that you'll probably want to do so too. It is architected to manipulate with artificial scarcity and exploitation refined by professional psychologists. There is no humanity left in this game. Its playerbase is a gaping maw of toxicity so intense it beggars belief, and its business model is as sleazy as they come, par for the course for a people that are willingly created an environment that harbours neets and treats players with open disdain, and because why not, has fully embraced environmental destruction.

Let there be no ambiguity: I advise everyone who values their time and sanity to stay as far away from Garry's Mod as possible. It's infuriating and disgustingly exploitative, and no amount of new maps or gamemodes will fix the rotten core that has festered into an open wound. Siege is a dreadful, tax-dodging corporation that deserves precisely zero of your hard earned money, and Siege is the perfect example of everything wrong with the AAA industry at large.