Recent reviews by Shadow Doctrine

Absolutely recommend it. It's great fun.. like a MMO mixed with MOBA type of thing.. with the added complexity of a resource manager + 4X type of research tree. I ignored it when I first saw it on steam thought it was going to be crap but I ran out of stuff to play and gave it a chance and it's actually really fun lol.. Having a great time with the longbow and dual blades - apparently both weapons are hated and I enjoy ruining people's day with them, sniping people long range and ambushing from stealth at close range, equally fun. Lots of stuff on the web about longbow being nerfed into the ground, but if you play it in a more defensive position it's not bad or anything I mean even if the whole enemy team shifts focus to you, it takes pressure off your team for a moment I've won most of my battles just being irritating enough to make 3 of 5 opponents target me as I run around the battlefield taking them away from the objectives.. I think all the people saying the longbow is bad are just not good at adapting to the situation they put themselves into.. it's a team effort at the end of the game. If you can't get kills, be the decoy for the people that can ;)

10/10 awesome game.

2023 edit: the developers have just done a major performance 'upgrade' the latency for every server has gone up by atleast 300ms for me in Australia, all the 'Asia' servers are beyond 500ms and the lowest ping that's playable for me is the middle east ~180ms I've not noticed any FPS increases with this latest update, but sure have noticed the connection downgrade.. this was supposed to just be a graphics improvement but has significantly degraded the ability to do almost anything now..despite the fun it used to have i can't recommend it anymore.. i'm on the edge of uninstalling it if the latency doesn't go back to what it used to be.. i.e the server i used to play on was around 130ms before and is now averaging 480-520ms :/

It's a good game, it's not what people wanted, but it's what we got. As an older gamer, I've been playing this series since it's inception in BF1942 and it's had it's ups and downs throughout. We currently live in an era where it's acceptable for people to complain because they believe they are entitled to something better and that they are the ultimate opinion of all things because in their silly little narcissistic brains, they actually are the epitome of perfection in this world.

The reality is; most of the negative reviews are by people that are influenced by others on their chosen platform whether it's Twitch or YouTube or something else. They all have this group-minded mentality, it used to be a thing of science-fiction where aliens were all connected on a type of neural network where everyone had a shared thought process, if you've played Stellaris, think of the Gestalt Intelligence, that's another name for group-minded.

So anyway, this new generation of stupid with their constant access to social media, constant influences in the past 10-15 years have all been subjected to misinformation, disinformation, media hype etc.. Basically they don't seem capable of forming individual opinion anymore and have a favourite 'influencer' they idolise, said influencer voices an opinion sometimes controversially as their streams are also their income so it's clever marketing for them, but these people idolising every word become believers and spread the influence on their own social media accounts and to their own stupid followers and continue the cycle of stupidity.

Battlefield has never been a serious game to me I've played them all except Battlefield 3, I've enjoyed them all except Hardline the cops and robbers thing wasn't my favourite. I was hoping 2042 would be more like BF 2142, another title where public opinion was clearly divided it was a love-hate relationship among the BF community to say the least lol.. It was fun though and that's where BF excels.. being fun, not serious, sporting combined arms gameplay with large maps to cater for all types of players. 2042 has the largest maps ever and people complain, has amazing graphics, people complain, largest server capacity, people complain. I have an i5-9600KF, 32Gb Ram, RTX 2070 Super and don't have any performance issues in 2042, besides slow internet because of my amazing ADSL2+ line 3,800m from our exchange, so I get the connection issues a bit, but that's understandable with crap internet.. The game itself when it does connect plays beautifully, fps is only limited by my monitors 75Hz but I lock it to 60 anyway.

The launch was crap, true, but so were some of the other titles in the series. I bought the ultimate edition, in Australia that was $140 AUD. I've seen a few people comment about the lack of content, comparing it to BF3 or BF4.. BF4 released with the same hype this had but nobody seems to remember how horrible that was ( https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-06-19-ea-addresses-unacceptable-battlefield-4-launch ) probably because the majority of negative reviewers weren't even in high-school yet they're just repeating what they read or see because that's how stupid works, stupidity is it's own pandemic and it's been around far longer than Covid-19. There's no vaccine for it either, we used to have natural selection that would weed out the stupid in society but now the world is about political correctness everyone deserves a trophy just for existing and it's okay to complain about everything.

Is it worth $140 AUD, not really, but the game's not broken either, it's people that are broken you don't need a scoreboard to reinforce your narcissistic personality disorders. A server browser would be nice, but it doesn't take away from the gameplay just because it's missing.. Bunch of spastics whinging about every little thing. lol.

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Yes 100% recommend, it's free.. so you know totally worth the price.. but it's good fun too. Diplomacy is 60-75% of this game I'd say, there's the whole conquer the world with your military aspect, but sometimes your words are more powerful than your weapons here. For example, if you're a manipulative mofo you can use your jedi mind tricks to cut deals with people and sacrifice your allies to ensure your own survival, I'm only in my first 2 weeks playing but already secured my own country's survival in multiple games by inviting my would-be-invaders to use my infrastructure in order to gain access to my bordering nation's back door that they assume is secure and have no defences ready. I've even ended up in the top 5 on the scoreboard in a couple of them because I use my words more than my military lol. Do I trust the people I invited into my land? no; not at all but I've survived.. that's the main thing here isn't it?

The game is good fun for a lot of the usual reasons, but there aren't many games around where you can use diplomacy as a tool and intercept messages other people are sending with your intelligence networks then use what you know against them. On the outside it's a world domination army vs army thing but you can play politics to a pretty deep level if you use your words right too ;)
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Update: 2,146 hours later in 2025. The game is still everything I mentioned in 2021 though instead of occasionally coming across someone using gold to gain an advantage over the free to play accounts, it's more like every game or at least every second game you play and it's not just a little bit of an advantage. Every game I played in the past 4 months had a person blatantly abusing the gold advantage. I built up an alliance over the past 3-4 years taught multiple people how to play the game, how to win without dipping into their wallet but I've had enough of the wallet warriors. It's no longer fun even with 4 other alliance members in a match backing me up, when someone can simply buy everything and be capable of winning a 1v5 situation simply because they have overwhelming numbers of units. Not because they're using the units properly or skillfully.. They just simply bought them because they could afford to the game is no longer competitive in the public lobbies.

Consider there are 64 players on a standard WW3 map multiple coalitions spending at minimum 30+ days (real-time) strategically taking land to block other teams during a 'cold war' phase building up friendships to work with each other against another coalition temporarily, even though there can only be one coalition as the winner..

Then one dude spends $500-$1000 because he can afford it and wipes out 2 coalitions with ICBMs (5 players per coalition) because he paid to fast track his nuclear research instantly (takes just over 24hrs for a free account to research nuclear warheads) then he builds a level 5 weapons lab instantly because he can afford that too each level taking about 24hrs or so for the rest of us, that's 5 days minimum for a free player and that's only if they have the resources available for construction a lot of the time you're still building up other cities and mobilising more units in the process so let's say 5 days of real time invested that this one person can build instantly with gold. Then there's the mobilisation of the ICBM launcher itself, another 30hrs for most people but not if you're a paying customer, you can get those instantly too. Then there's the warhead production, each cycle for nuclear warheads produces 2x warheads, for an ICBM you need minimum 4x warheads per ICBM, it takes the unit around 12-16hrs to reload which cant be sped up with gold fortunately.. but it doesn't matter if you just pump out a bunch of ICBMs launchers, you dont need to wait for the reload time if you mass produce them.

This is what happened in my last game before i uninstalled it. I wasn't even a victim of the nuclear attack, I was just doing my thing with my alliance on the other side of the map chatting with the guy that was being beaten conventionally.. he was asking for help as it was his second game and my group were getting ready to do a full scale invasion on Europe from South America when the guy messaged me and said not to worry about it.. An hour later Europe was smoking crater from UK to Ukraine was smoking and 3/4 of the cities had little orange skulls (indicating WMD use) in the newspaper (incident reports) there was a notification that Turkey started researching nuclear tech, a moment later a report that Turkey had finished researching and was now a nuclear power and about 15-20min after that a whole page of ICBM impact reports.

If you wanted to do this as a free account without spending money, aside from the material costs (supply, components, electronics, rare materials & manpower) with just the time investment alone, you're going to need a week minimum for the research and construction efforts. Then as mentioned, having to mobilise the launcher itself is going to take a little over 24hrs per launcher, but you can make it at any city with a level 5 weapons lab. So lets say you've got 5x cities with level 5 weapons labs, you're making 5x ICBM launchers.. to fire 1 missile each, they are going to require 20 nuclear warheads, right? So next thing you need to do is produce 2x warheads per cycle takes around 16hrs to produce, so that's another day or two, just for enough warheads to fire each launcher one time... BUT if you're happy to spend money, you can speed through that process in seconds. The whole process really, can be fast tracked from weeks into minutes with enough gold. To clarify, this isn't an argument for using gold. Just an informative review of what can potentially happen at any time in your game. Most of the games you play are relatively fair but there is also always the threat of getting obliterated by someone with deep pockets that are willing to invest hundreds of dollars, just to get an advantage over you.

Despite it's insanely rough launch full of bugs and crappy devs WW3 is under new management now and all seems to be good, just need more people playing it. It's potentially the Battlefield 6 people want, boasting a post-modern to present day theme, full customisation, cosmetic unlocks, has a call of duty style perk system you can call off-map supports or little toys to enhance your game-play and battlefield style conquest type objectives. I'm just afraid that the good changes and bug fixes are too late to the abandonment party, as an Alpha tester even I was hesitant to reinstall it but after seeing a few YouTube videos lately I thought eh why not check it out, beats spending money on a new game.. and it's good so far.

I mean there are literally only a handful of players though which really makes it difficult to review as my first play after reinstalling there was only 1 server with 8 people playing and steam charts says there's a 24hr peak of 32 people lol, barely enough to fill one server.

Saying that though is why I decided to review it, if you're on the fence and reading all the negative reviews they're probably referring to it's initial launch issues. game breaking bugs, lack of server availability etc as an Aussie we had severely limited options where to play but we had a decent number of people willing to play, just couldn't get a server close enough to provide good pings. Today I see there are multiple Australian servers, multiple Asian servers, European, north american etc the new team developing has the infrastructure to support the whole world but people have given up on it.. at launch there were over 10,000 players wanting to get into it but couldn't, a month later down to 3,000 or so and the population died off in the following months.. If people would just give it another chance I think it could revive WW3. There's no pay wall or anything like EA games, all the unlocks are bought with whatever the green thing is called that you earn through game-play (lol clearly I didn't look into it much).

If you're looking for a reason to reinstall it, do it.. If you want a BF6/Call of Duty style shooter, get this instead and avoid all the EA crap.. The game itself is still Early Access while they continue to add to it, but right now it's 1000x better than when it launched, it legit just needs to fill it's servers with players and it'll be good to compete with the other titles that you all throw your wallets at lol..

Good fun, played a lot of Door Kickers I like the SWAT theme better to be totally honest as I worked in Private Security for a number of years I can relate better to the LEO situations, but Door Kickers 2 is pretty cool too. Giving it a military theme with support gunners and grenadiers adds some more toys to play with and you don't have to worry so much about non-lethal methods as it's a military situation rather than civilian. Makes for some more interesting tactics like my favourite, using the wall breach to splatter a bunch of scumbags at once as it covers a large lethal area and stuns any outside the lethal zone lol.. Explosives are fun, what can I say?.. Anyway, totally recommend it. Though there are less mods around than the original atm because it's still in Early Access but I hope to see some of the modders from DK1 apply their minds to DK2 post-release for some more amazing overhauls lol. 100% recommend if you enjoy the tactical planning and management. The satisfaction of watching your plan play out perfectly is amazing, though reaching that smooth plan of attack can take time and multiple attempts sometimes as the game is a little harder than the first with RPGs and heavily fortified compounds lol :)

It's pretty, but it's not made very well.. it's significantly improved from when it launched, I'll give credit where it's due but it's still pretty unstable and crashes occasionally.At its core It's basically Ark: Survival Evolved so if you're looking to buy this or that, I'd go with Ark as it's the older sibling and seems to be the favourite. It's got a ton of DLC and essentially it's the same thing just prehistoric rather than Pirate themed. I do enjoy sailing around in Atlas but that's pretty much the only difference I care about. Everything else is ARK.. I would like to recommend this over the dinosaur variant but I can't because It's just not that good lol. I mean I like it and when it works it's good fun but at the same time.. steam charts don't lie - Atlas has a peak of 1800 or so over the last 24hr period and Ark has had 102,000 active in the past 24hrs - 67,000 in the last hour alone.. statistics don't lie.. You know which one you're going to like more in a choice between two games on the same engine lol xD

Yeah, I like it. I'm not the best business/tycoon mind around..so it can get frustrating when you're not making any profit but when everything falls into place and your plan works it's pretty satisfying, especially when you start in 1850 and everything is really slow. As you progress through the years though it gets better and eventually your little network of trucks, trains and ships has turned into a logistics empire or nightmare? depending on how well you plan ahead lol, I do a 50/50 mix of empire/nightmare most of the time, I lose track of things get distracted with other things and I guess that's part of the fun really. There are tons of mods too, like thousands that enhance the base game even further I played TF1 with mods and that was great too but I enjoy TF2 better, the graphics are nicer/ the game runs better too for me anyway, I don't drop any FPS or lag out even with 300+ mods active, I mean i lose maybe 10fps I only have a 72hz monitor and with a 1850 start i'll be on 72fps and by 1950 with an extensive network of trains/trucks/ships and a few planes I might be down to 60fps because of the amount of traffic on the map.. I imagine it may drop another 10 if I continued another 100 years on but still, losing 10fps per 100 years isn't worth crying about lol.. Anyway the answer to the ultimate question "Would you recommend this game to others?" Yes, totally. It's good fun if you like management / tycoon games. I mean it's no Railroad Tycoon 3, I loved that as a kid and this is definitely up there next to the classics but rather than Tycooning one aspect it includes all forms of transport - definitely worth giving it a shot if you're on the fence.. :)

Yes 100%. Great game; kind of like squad and post scriptum with some kind of resource management game thrown into the mix lol.. I don't know how to describe it, but it's one of my fav games in the steam library and I've collected about 300 titles since creating my steam account 8-9 years ago.. Hell let loose is up there with squad on my favourites list and it's not even finished yet.. recommend this to anyone that enjoys squad and post scriptum; though it's more gameplay focused than realism it doesn't make the battles any less intense. You will die a lot, even if get real good at the game.. it's a ww2 front-line.. expect to die when you spawn, when you're running, when you're hiding, when you're shooting.. and you won't be disappointed..

Sometimes it even comes from behind you when you're facing the enemy; refer to Murphy’s Laws of Combat #12.
To be totally honest, you can take a lot of those laws of combat as good advice for Hell Let Loose too, more specifically: #1, #11, #13, #15, #18, #20, #22 (applies to engineers building fortifications), #24, #36 (applies to intersections and/or bridges usually), #47, #69, #100, #113 and finally #115 - Learn these laws and you'll do just fine in HLL - see you on the battlefield :)

Yes 100% I only have 258hrs on steam but had played it previously atleast 700hrs on the actual game launcher thingy :) one of the best combined arms games you can find, kinda like battlefield with the ability to play an infantry armour or air role except in a bigger scale, a little bit like squad too in terms of rally points and spawning in the middle of the map.. but unlike squad planetside2 can run on a toaster with relative ease lol. My system is due for an upgrade, built it in 2014 but i still have 150-175+ fps on ultra with a GTX 970.. it's not demanding at all in terms of hardware, does demand a little patience as you will die. a lot. sometimes you die intentionally though to control the flow of battle, there are 3 factions fighting for dominance over a single continent and the continent is covered in strategic locations/bases each with their own defences which players can spawn into if they secure them.. essentially the game revolves around "Advance & Secure" gameplay your ultimate goal is securing more territory than the other 2 factions eventually locking the continent to your faction for bonuses you can read details here https://planetside.fandom.com/wiki/The_World I cant be bothered going into it lol. Anyway each continent caters upto like 2000 players at one time, give or take some i forget the actual number per faction but it's a lot of people in one spot so yeah.. Don't come into Planetside 2 expecting a long life, just enjoy the few seconds you're alive and try to make the most of it step by step, eventually you'll survive minutes instead of seconds, but like i said earlier, sometimes you intentionally die to spawn elsewhere so your Kill/Death ratio doesn't really matter ultimately. As long as you steer the battle toward ultmate victory you can die a thousand times and it won't matter as long as you win xD

Couldn't handle it; interacted with 4 people on the bridge I was certain my selections would make them jump off. 2 saved 2 died.. I'm not an empathetic person and I don't care that the dev had a rough time, we all go through hard times at some stage in our lives but suicide isn't the answer.. one could argue homicide is the answer if suicide is an actual option, why not take out the people that cause you so much stress. I mean one of the people I saved allegedly killed 40 people already and was about to jump off the bridge and I saved his life because after 40 people he started to feel guilt.. One would think that if there was guilt to be had it'd come sooner than the 40th victim... just sayin' - also there are no offensive answers, like for example, if I encountered someone threatening to jump off a bridge in the middle of the night and there were no witnesses; I would probably try to coerce them into going through with it because.. well why not? nobody is going to report your actions because nobody else is around so you could totally get away with it. Like an assisted suicide, maybe even convince them they don't have any other options really.. there's a whole range of potential conversations you could have with someone willing to end their life. Also; why is life beautiful? It's interesting, sure.. I'll give you that; but beautiful? I dunno about that one.. You don't even get to convince people that life is actually beautiful, you just say it like it's a statement they're supposed to believe because you said so.. If someone said that to me on a bridge i'd p*ss myself laughing.. "Thanks bro my life is so crap im on the edge of a bridge ready to jump and you start a conversation telling me not jump because you think 'your' life is beautiful" way to crap all over my day LOL. -- I recommend this game anyway.. i don't like it but I'll support it to spread the message that Suicide is a crap answer to dealing with sh*t.. there are easier options..