Recent reviews by Akaren

Alright, I'm just getting pissed off with this game. Honestly, I see people complaining about the gunplay, the lack of content, yadda yadda and while these are valid complaints, I don't think they ruin the game. Killing Floor 2 suffered from lacking launch content and other issues, like MTX - so it's whatever, aslong as stuff gets added along the way, I can manage. I'm used to that ♥♥♥♥ at this point. BUT BROTHER. HOW THE ♥♥♥♥ DO YOU LAUNCH A GAME IN THIS STATE?

What do I mean by that? Let me give you some examples in my 10 hours.
1. I'll join a match, find three dudes running around jumping off a ledge. Why? I look up, see there's 1 enemy left, but where? Oh, I realise. The last enemy glitched out of the map and can't be killed. These guys are killing themselves with fall damage because THEY LITERALLY CANNOT PROGRESS. At least if they die, they'll get some exp and resources, but here's the kicker. The map had no spots with big enough fall damage to kill, only take to 1 HP it seems. So unless they had grenades to self damage with, they had to leave the match and lose all progress. Wild.
2. Server instability/lag. Brother, I have clips of me playing Ninja, firing my hook and then it taking multiple seconds before I end up zipping to them for the ability. It's unplayable sometimes, literally.
3. Alt tabbing. Alt tabbing in this game is like going to a scummy, shady casino. Chances are, you're going to lose. For instance, when joining a match, I alt-tabbed to pause the music I was listening to, tabbed back in - I cannot move my mouse in game. I can move movement wise, but not my mouse. So I press escape, it opens the menu, sure. I still cannot move my mouse, but not only that. I can still move in the game while in the escape menu. How does alt tabbing cause this??? It also leads to loads of other stuff in different situations, sometimes (like that previous one) meaning I'll have to alt+F4.
4. Random softlocks. I do not know what causes these, they usually happen in menus. Skill menu is a big one. Yes, these also need alt+F4. You'll be using that button a lot in this game.
5. Random crashes. I haven't had too many, but in a game with so much grinding like KF 2 and 3, crashes are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ awful to experience period.
6. Misc glitches. Audio cutting out, corpses standing up and t-posing, etc etc. These aren't too big an issue tbh, I don't mind the minor glitch here and there. But with everything else above, it feels like I'm still in a playtest.

This game was rushed out the door, despite the playtests. This game should have cooked for at least another six months, maybe even a year or more in the oven. Maybe of added some more content, but honestly, the focus should of more been on fine tuning gunplay and squashing all the bugs, since these bugs are absolutely unacceptable in a game not even labelled as early access. I am not kidding, if I could, I'd ask for a refund. DO NOT BUY AS IT IS. If you can get it on a HEFTY sale, then that's up to you, but brother as it is, it's an insult. Embracer Group, I have no doubt, kicked this thing through the door before it was nearly ready enough. It's so sad since I wanna love it. I love Killing Floor and I want Killing Floor to be a franchise that lives long and does well. But this ain't it.

Sadly, even beyond the bugs, if they're fixed - there are still bountful problems coating a game with solid potential. If the game was still in development and I was playing playtests, I'd be optimistic. I am not optimistic. Especially not with Embracer Group holding the gun to the head all of the developers under their umbrella after their little Saudi deal fell through.

♥♥♥♥ Embracer Group. All my homies hate Embracer Group.

The credit card has never been more powerful in a TCG. Have fun going against someone using their 3 Legendary Olivia's to superevolve their other 3 Legendaries. Have fun not being able to put together a single deck because you can't dust those 3 copies of a card you never plan to use and a single Legendary cost 3500 dust to make. I hope Cygames goes bankrupt with the way they've been going lately, they deserve financial ruin from this kinda greed bro.

Update: So I played more, hoping that if I grinded hard enough, I could get the decks I liked anyway. First off, I never managed to complete one deck to it's full form even within almost 20 hours. Second off, this game isn't worth playing, is what I came to realise. Maybe in the future it'll improve, but right now you will encounter the same two decks every match, it's boring and miserable. It's Portalcraft with the occasional Runecraft, all of who run the same deck. Honestly, just go play any other card game.

'Make FPS Great Again' he yaps, then makes an FPS worse than their older FPS and slaps on a needless battle royale and ass loads of overpriced cosmetics.

- Abilites suck. Who wanted abilites? Who asked for this?!
- Faction specific grenades. Why? Why must you do this? Why are you trying to make a hero shooter all of a sudden?
- Faction specific weapons. Why? Do you just enjoy making ♥♥♥♥ decisions?
- Perks. Faction passives. Brother, I'm going to put the gun in my mouth - yes, FPS games have a problem, you are the problem 1047 Games. Chasing trends to chase a profit, forgetting any focus on soul or vision. Just money.
- Attachments. I love attachments and gun customisation. I'm a sucker for a good gunsmithing system. It's one of the things that I spend ages on in stuff like Tarkov. But I *don't* want it in games like this. It's like adding water to wine. You're just making it weaker. Especially when, to get them, you have to *grind for hours*. Meaning players who've played more than you? They legitimately, undeniably, have an actual gameplay advantage. It doesn't help that the 'attachments' are so boring and basic that they're really ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, they don't add any fun to the game, they're not deep/customisable enough to make your gun feel speciall/unique, they're just an extra grind. To keep you playing, of course.
- Portals. They feel like such an afterthought due to map design facilitating their use so poorly. It's wild that the 'main appeal' is an afterthought. It'd be like if you played Portal 2 and it was just jumping puzzles.
- Charms? Battle passes? Battle royale? Banners? Sprays? I hate it here.
- Power weapons. If like me, you grew up on Halo, you know how pog the system of power weapons are. This ♥♥♥♥ goes back to golden days of Quake/Unreal design philosphy, where you'd have resources on the map you'd be rewarded for using well. That ♥♥♥♥ held up great as the way it worked in Halo and worked great in the orignial Splitgate. Brother, it says a lot about your game that people are just walking past them like they don't exist 75% of the time. In Halo motheryuckers would fight over the spot power weapons would spawn. I remember that happening in Splitgate 1. I *never* saw that happen in my 2 hours of playing.

This last point and a few of the others like abilites sum up a lot of the problem with this game.
It's too much, which makes it too little.
Sometimes, more is better, Halo 1-3 and to even Reach are great examples. Hell, even Unreal/Quake or GUESS WHAT Splitgate 1.
If you keep things 'simpler' (not easier), people have to get creative with those tools, they have to maximise all they can from them and that is exciting. But when given abilities, faction grenades, portals, power weapons, sprinting, sliding - I have too much ability to do whatever I want, which leads me wanting to do none of it. I'm excited in Halo 3 when I use a grenade jump to traverse the map, because I'm engaging with the game in unique, thoughtful ways, because the game *wants* me to. This game is like CoD in the bad way - you play it on autopilot. You aim, you shoot, but you don't need to think. It doesn't ask or want that from you. It wants you to consume, it wants you to complete dailies/weeklies and it wants you to spend money. You're not here to have a good time. You're the product.

This game makes me clench my asscheeks so tight that it could easily count as a full glute workout - 11/10

I honestly struggle to think of things to label as 'positive', I can think of 'okay', but not 'positive' from my brief playtime. This is like DOOM if it was made by people who don't play games.

- Even at literally 0 sens, the sensitivity is stupidly high. At 1600 DPI, I can do two full 360s at 0 sensitivity. It's awful.
- Motion blur. Brother, I wish this was never a thing in any games, but the fact that it not only exists BUT YOU CAN'T EVEN DISABLE IT???
- Terrible visuals. Things like the edges of the screen being blurry to give the feeling of being in a mask, instead just make the game look butt ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ugly - why do I want my game to be blurry? Spoilers - I don't. I want to see the game.
The game graphically is such a mixed bag. Design wise, it's an alright, generic cyberpunk, sci-fi vibe - but it is very generic. But what makes it awful are all the heaps of post processing layered on, that you mostly can't disable, that make the game look and feel so cheap to play.
- Weapons are pretty boring and generic. Wow, a shotgun, a pistol, an SMG? You're playing with a super sci-fi theme man, you can try and be a *little* interesting with how the weapons work, but only thing you get there is the DOOM style weapon mods.
- Nexus. Dude. The level of cringe from this 'I'm 12 and this is deep' feeling AI bot made me want to quit so many times before I even reached 30 minutes. It's insufferable. This edgy, pseudo-intellectual bull that it throws at you any moment of movement between linear one-way corridors is maddening. Whoever wrote the dialog, I beg of you, learn the word 'subtlety'.
- Difficulty. In the 30 minutes of playing (on Hard), I felt like I was struggling to stay awake. It is so piss easy that the difficulty is in staying awake long enough to keep playing. The mechanics are so bad that the only difficulty that comes is from the game throwing enemies with layers of Armor at you that are just bullet sponges, since your ability to strip armor, is on a cooldown. But even this isn't a challenge, it's just boring.
- Optimisation. What? You thought a game would be optimised well? In 2025? Are you high?

This game does nothing new and it definitely does nothing interesting. I hate the argument of 'Oh, it's a X-thing ripoff' or 'It's just a X-thing clone' - it is fine and even good to be inspired by an already existing thing aslong as you ADD or INNOVATE on it, otherwise, you're just making what's already been done. This issue here is they're not *just* doing what you could get from DOOM, they're doing it way worse and adding nothing.

Man, it hurts to put this as a no, but ♥♥♥♥ me. The decisions in this game are baffling and right now, it's almost unplayable for me.

I had so much fun for the first 15 hours - every match was super close, so many of them ended up going 3/3 and going to duels. My past 15 matches almost have been just 4/0 stomps with my team being stomped to the ground - someone on their team going 12/4. I keep playing, hoping the MMR will correct itself - it doesn't. This keeps happening, endlessly. The matchmaking has just ♥♥♥♥♥♥ itself for me where I'm stuck constantly matched against players better than me, meaning it's just nothing but losses and no fun. The part that sucks even more is you'll lose 4 in a row to this ♥♥♥♥♥♥ matchmaking/misplaced MMR and guess what. You get placed into a match with bots. So you kill them all, no-one on your team dies, everyone knows they're bots, then it continues. It's insulting. It's manipulative. It's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ slimy and gross. If I knew bot matches like this would happen in matchmaking, I never would of spent a dime on this game.

But that's maybe just my luck, maybe that's just *my* problem and it won't happen to you. This will:
- MTX everywhere - all cosmetic, sure, it still feels like a mobile game when you go to the main menu after each match and see 'NEW' in twenty spots for all the worthless ♥♥♥♥ to redeem. 50 gold, a sticker pack, 100 glunite coins, etc. I don't care. I'm here to shoot guns.
- Imbalance. Imbalance in guns, I expect, imbalance in heroes/characters, I expect - but when you add in the cards too, the amount of imbalance that takes place means sometimes a match can feel like RNG.
If they get 'Big Head' plus 'Headshot Master' GG man, go next. If they get 'Close Quarters Combat' with a knife dash card or something? GG, go next. You're simply, purely, losing to luck. I want cards to play an impact, but *strategically*. I don't want them to be what decides a match. I want them to alter the match. Cards like 'Revealing enemies when you plant a bomb', sure, it's an advantage, but it's an acceptable one. Cards like 'Your enemies randomly shoot their weapons' which causes them to reveal their position, waste ammo, etc - they're dumb as ♥♥♥♥. When you get that card and win with it, it feels like you won because of luck, it feels like nothing. When you lose to it, it feels like you were cheated.
- Maps. Personally I feel like some of the maps in this game are cheeks. With how much more mobile you can be here compared to the other two obvious games like this, it's rough having so many angles on all the maps to cover - it leads defense to feel *really* rough compared to attacking. Attacking feels so easy in comparison, at least to me.
- Abilities. I used to feel when playing Valorant 'Hmm, this feels more like a 'Who's better with their agents/abilites game' rather than 'Who's better with their guns/strategy' game. I get a similar feeling sometimes with this game when you look at some of the characters. Axon has a rocket launcher that not only does splash damage, it *ONE SHOTS ON DIRECT HIT.*, Hollowpoint gets a free sniper every round that one shots when fully charged, Pathojen can heal herself, has a barrier wall (that can bloody block doorways fully) and a placeable toxic trap she can remotely activate. In a way, I like how free it feels, but when you mix this *with* the RNG cards, it's too damn much man.
- BOTS. ♥♥♥♥ me. Whoever came up with the idea of 'oh, put them in a bot match when they lost a bunch' should get blacklisted from the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ industry. This crap, more than any of the other points, makes me want to quit hard. I hope if *any* of the other stuff I've complained about here gets addressed, it's this. It's ass. There are no redeeming points to it. For the love of God, remove bots from matchmaking.

Update: After playing more, did the problem improve? Haha... no, it got worse. I'm now being matched against only Plats-Masters. Like bro, I am at most gold - but I don't touch ranked because I want to still experiment and learn. I CAN'T. Because I'm playing against people way out of my skill range. I cannot learn anything from these matches, so I cannot improve. So I'll do what I should of done ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ ages ago tbh, uninstall. This is just not a remotely enjoyable experience.

I'd say 'Mixed' is actually a pretty good way to describe how I feel about this game. In some areas, it feels great, like gun customization, but in others, it's borderline atrocious. I'm going to list just some of the major gripes I have, since I honestly feel these problems are much larger than I've seen some people make them out to be.

- Smoke. This is one that's often brought up, but it's miserable. It makes the game so boring to play when all sightlines are smokelines instead.
- Abilities. Some abilities in this game, I think, are fun and decent. For instance, the quick deployable cover, Vough's dash, etc. But some are just frustrating. The smoke is certainly one, but the one that's more annoying is the Sonar Arrow and Sonic stuff. They're just annoying. They're not fun to have go on around you and the Sonic stuff especially is nauseating with how it shakes your screen. Speaking of...
- Screen shake. My God. Everything shakes your screen so much it'll make you swear you're taking backshots while you're aiming when there's explosions, sonic traps, etc going of all around shaking your screen around nonstop, ontop of the hitpunch you get while aiming being huge, making this feel even worse.
- Variety. In terms of weapons, there's loads. In terms of weapons, you'll see, there's basically none. You'll see Car-15 after Car-15. Characters? You'll see Engineer dude, Medic dude and D-Wolf (assault dude) non-stop and rarely see any other characters.
- Stats. Handling. Stability. Control. You can kinda figure out what they do from the name, but also not really. Does stability help me with recoil or does control? Also things in calibration, where you can fine tune your weapon, you'll see things like 'Pupillary dilation' with zero explanation as to what the bloody hell that does or means. You gotta just fiddle until you kinda figure it out. And this is true for a load of things. Not the end of the world, but certainly not great.
- Killstreaks (or whatever they're called). This whole mechanic, in how it's currently implemented, feels *very* tacked on to me. I think this has potential as an idea, but needs major work.
- Maps. Bro, I could write pages long reviews on their own on how bad the maps in this game are. They make Battlefield 2042 maps look good which I didn't think was possible.
- Gunplay. If I had to describe how guns in this game felt, I would have to use the word 'Plastic.' I can't think how else to describe it. If you play it, you'll see what I mean.

Last of all, I think a big problem this game has is *identity*. It having both an extraction shooter and battlefield-like mode in the same game I think does more harm than good. Splitting the players, splitting development resources and most of all, splitting the design philosophy of the game itself. Things that work and make perfect sense in a Tarkov extraction shooter environment, like Marksman Rifles, don't translate as well to a Battlefield environment. So the game has loads of Marksman Rifles, but boy you'll basically never see anyone using them in Warfare let me tell you. This extends to other areas of more core design and I think this is an issue, as it leads to this game feeling like two halves of different games. So you just gotta choose what half-game you wanna play. Personally, I'd rather play a game that knows what it is, wants to be and who it's trying to please. Not a game trying to please everyone and ending up pleasing no-one.

Remember, the best way to test if friendly fire is enabled is to unload a 12gauge buckshot round into the back of your friends skull.

For those wondering, yes, it WAS worth the 3rd degree burns.

I mean, this is an MMO, so I wasn't expecting a good launch, like, at all. Hell, as I was expecting the worst. I was expecting the worst of the worst. And somehow, I'm still disappointed. That's an accomplishment right there Neowiz, well done. So what's the problem(s)? LET ME GET MY ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ LIST. (Just to clarify, this review was written 29/05/2018, so these problems may be fixed down the line. Some of them)

1.) Google Translate - I think and I swear to God, I genuinely think some of the translations were done with Google Translate. "You reached 5 level" for example. I mean, Jesus Christ, even the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ TUTORIAL isn't proof read.
2.) No Action Camera - Hey, do you dislike having to hold right click to move your camera? Me too. Did Neowiz promise they'd revamp combat from the JP/KR/RUS releases? Yep. But somehow, they didn't add this. Oh, except for Berserksers. Because that makes sense.
3.) Server Lag - It's at the point where I can complete a quest, then once the quest is completed, I'll get the same quest given to me, complete it again, and repeat. So it gets so bad, I can't even progress. Though this might be a bug and not lag, who ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ knows at this point.
4.) Queues - Do you like waiting 50 minutes to get into your games? Me too.
5.) Character Bound Founder Pack Items - ♥♥♥♥ you Neowiz.
6.) Optimization - I have GTX 1080 TI, 32 gigs of ram, an 17 7700 and a ♥♥♥♥ bigger than a foot long hot dog and somehow this game manages to drop to 20 FPS every now and then for sometimes a good minute.
7.) Classes - There are 5. That is all.
8.) Skill Descriptions - It's like they asked themselves "How can we make them give as little detail as possible?"
9.) Neowiz - Displeased with your product? Want to share your criticisms in the Steam Discussions, like a true 'Merican with freedom of speech? Well, good luck. Chances are, Neowiz will lock your thread or downright delete it.
10.) Splash Screen - Start up the game, splash screen. Wait 2 minutes. This will likely be your first experience with Bless. A HUGE bug. Personally, I found my experience was having to restart my game over and over until one time, bam, I finally got past the splash screen? Why? How? I don't know, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ magic. Same happened the next day.
11.) I could go on, I really could, but I need to go do a JO sesh to get this negative chakra out of my system and into a crystal ASAP.

TL;DR: Worst launch I think I've ever seen and that's saying something. I played the game for 3-4 hours. Over half of that was trying to get the damn thing working and then getting into it. Speaks for itself, really.

If they fix all these things, or atleast most of them, it has the genuine, huge potential to be masterful. It could be awesome. But so far, these developers have given me no reason to give them that much faith. Don't get it yet. Wait. If they fix this ♥♥♥♥? Then consider it.