Recent reviews by Bit

Great game, but you should take note that the engine holds it back. I still think it's a great grab if you can get it on sale and like CQB or puzzles. It's not intended to be a perfectly realistic simulation, but you can certainly learn some of the tactics used by actual teams.

What do I mean by it being held back? Well, most of your time playing will be spent drawing paths for your guys. You then have to click on those paths to get your guys to do things that keep them from dying. This is not always an intuitive control experience, and involves a lot of inaccurate dragging.

It's very finicky to try and click on the right spot (especially when various things start overlapping). Sometimes a path will get drawn a little funny. This can be because of hard it is to draw a straight line with a mouse, but even if you're perfectly steady, the engine will get your lines stuck on objects, sometimes drawing weird loops *backwards* if your path-drawing bumps into one. Sometimes you'll set a waypoint you didn't mean to set. Inevitably, you will need to try to correct a mistake -- and if you don't correct it just right, you can accidentally delete a huge chain of orders that took 15 minutes to set up. There is no "undo." The only option is to recreate that planning all over again, which can take a very long time (depending how complex the mission is) and can be very frustrating (especially if you end up making another mistake in the process).

It has a steep learning curve where you'll be fighting with the controls and wishing the devs would fix this stuff (the official word is that they'd have to revamp the entire engine, and so they just tell people to wait for Doorkickers 2), but eventually it's pretty enjoyable once you start getting better at avoiding mistakes and entering the Zen of creating as minimal a plan as possible. This makes some of the extra challenges very hard, but so far (I'm only maybe 1/3 of the way through the game), I've found it doable. Perhaps I'll feel differently as the difficulty ramps up.

This sets the bar for hacking sims. The tutorial is a little stiff to go through, but necessary in order to be able to take on the challenging missions throughout the game, and you'll learn a whole lot if you go ahead and Google the tools the game emulates; they're real, and chilling.

It's not the kind of game for everyone, but I'd recommend it for power users that like puzzles.

This used to be one of my favourite games. The playerbase and the studio have both slid so far downhill.


There's still good fun to be had with the single player campaigns and challenges. How much these are worth in today's market, compared to other titles, is another story.

Multiplayer is full of trolls. Really, it's all the same con, but with many aspects and details (should you care to read; otherwise, feel free to stop here). If you play against other humans, don't expect them to have any honour, decorum, or even really any basic courtesy at all. Even if you stay away from PvP and just play against bot opponents with other humans on your team, griefing and toxicity is still rampant. I think this was worsened by a huge degree when Relic (the studio) fell on hard times and decided it would be a good idea to release a boatload of free license keys for the game to every corner of the Earth -- many of which seem to have made their way into the hands of jerks worldwide.

It is quite common for teammates to go AFK (so that you will be outnumbered). They may try to: destroy your base; team-kill or block your units; use abilities in such a way as to assist your enemy... and these are just the things that happen *inside* of the match. In the game lobby, there is no way to keep someone from rejoining after you kick them. If you kick a troll, expect them to instantly rejoin. You will then have to kick them again. And again. And again... You can close the slot so they can't join, but *then no one else can join in that slot, either.* It allows one player to effectively shut down your lobby, at least temporarily. Relic has made huge oversights like this throughout the game experience that allows bad behaviour to reign supreme.

The dev team hasn't been doing so great in recent years. The failure of Dawn of War III; and overall interest drying up in their niche industry (real-time strategy games); have left them demoralized and trying to scrape by with budget cuts and huge turnover rates on their staff. I wanted to believe that they would try to fix some of their flubs as a result of this process, as they keep claiming to be trying to do -- but they seem to just be repeating the same mistakes, year-after-year. The moderators they put in charge of their forums are often petty and will end up siding with trolls. Toxicity ends up being encouraged rather than discouraged, even though they claim to fight it. I'm not talking about little things like people calling each other 'stupidheads', either. I am speaking of literal nazi worship and a litany of other things that aren't worth repeating in a Steam game review (but wow, are a lot of them bad; you'll just have to take my word for it).

The latest initiative to try and "clean up" the playerbase is by encouraging players to submit reports of other players who are violating the community terms of service. This is the sort of thing I would welcome *if it was done years ago.* It is far too late to act as if this is a solution now. The problem is already systemic. The onus on the player filing the report to prove there is even a violation worth investigating. *Maybe* (if the reporter is lucky) someone that Relic has hired to look at game logs will check into it. Then, maybe they will find enough 'evidence' to possibly determine that a violation has been made. The list of violations are not written very solidly. They are intentionally left pretty wide open to interpretation. Then, if a violation has indeed been determined *sufficient* enough for some kind of action to be taken, that will hopefully happen. Unfortunately, that might just be to ask the violating party to "please stop." When you consider that a lot of the worst violators have been doing this stuff for literal *years* on end, all the while saying some absolutely horrendous things to people (even relative to the 'new normal' of defamation in society today), that may seem like a very empty response, and quite the hollow victory for the person who submitted the report. The reporter will probably never even be told what action was taken, if any at all. There is no positive reinforcement in place -- only negative reinforcement, and mostly for the players being wronged.

Relic needs to get their ducks in a row if they're going to keep any of the few fans they've got left on their side. Barring some kind of sensational surprise blockbuster hit game (what about a hybrid MOBA-RTS!? Kappa), they are digging their own grave and defiling their own once-great franchises by allowing these latest titles to continue perpetually dying in infamy.

Back during the first few years this game was out, I would have recommended it. Since then, the playerbase has gotten ridiculously toxic. The algorithms in place to try and fix that have actually made it even worse for a lot of people. In my opinion (and I'm sure people will argue with me on this), CS is mostly a griefer's game now. If you have friends near your skill level that you can trust and regularly play with, you can still have some fun with it; but stay very far from solo queue; it is absolutely not worth it anymore. It may be alright for a time while you're still new -- but once you start to encounter people who want to destroy your Elo and Trust Factor will do so (body-blocking your line of fire/movement, intentionally running into your molotovs, shooting near your head while you're trying to hold a choke point, etc.), and none of Valve's systems in place will stop them. Overwatch might eventually get some of the worst offenders, but not until after they've already done their damage.

If you're considering buying this game, do yourself a favour and try it for free first. It is multiplayer-only, and your mileage may vary depending on who's around to play with. The player population has started to dwindle and there's quite a bit of toxicity. I wish I could just play it single player, but even the PvE mode (which is extremely limited and buggy) isn't really practical with only one player.

Edit - Dec.10, '19:
Still a lack of players, which leads to a lack of funding for development. For years now, things have only gotten worse in terms of: the game itself, the behaviour of its owners, and the demeanor of the playerbase. There are a few die-hard fans trying to keep it afloat, but I think they are only going to regret paying for what they think are the server bills when the publisher simply decides to pull the plug instead.

A very fun WWII real-time strategy game. Great single player campaigns and fun multiplayer, though the player community is dying. Made by Relic when they were still owned by THQ (THQ is now defunct and Relic was bought by Sega). it utilizes the same engine as the Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II game. Use artillery, call in air support, control squads of infantry and heavy support weaponry, build defenses, tanks, snipers, rocket launchers, etc. The multiplayer networks are a bit weird now that they've been transferred over from THQ to Steam, but it's still very worth a try.

The original Day of Defeat was a community-made Half-Life 1 mod. This is the Source version Valve made around the time they released Team Fortress 2. A very good team-based first-person shooter, WWII-themed. Play up to 12v12 matches on either the American or German teams, using actual weapon loadouts and fighting on maps inspired by real battles.