Recent reviews by sammy

This game is worth a good review for the generous amount of content in the demo alone.

In short: this game is a co-op immersive sim with cheeky Half-Life 1 aesthetics and crafting. What's not to love? Well... performance is a bit lacking in comparison to what it offers to the eye.

Great game if you can push through the Act 1 murder mystery, which is an odd way to introduce this already odd story. Features a lengthy campaign, simple to use 2 player coop, turn-based combat, limited hand holding, tons of freedom in interaction with the game world.

Pros:
- Good RPG elements,
- Sandboxy combat,
- Freedom in problem solving feels very rewarding,
- Fun exploration,
- Voice acting (for the most part).

Cons:
- Annoying bugs (mostly coming from coop, most issues solved with a reload),
- Turn order bar never ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ works,
- Sometimes inconsistent move projections, easy to misclick attacks,
- Often jarring humour, inconsistent tone,
- Crafting is a bit hit or miss.

Overall, a fun and exceptionally rewarding experience but nearing the end I just wanted to move on to DOS2. Hoping for a more serious story and more QoL.

Promising game but launched a bit too soon. Closest alternative to Tarkov but without all the tedium and moronic design decisions. YAGER are showing themselves to be a competent studio, so I'm looking forward to see what they have in store for us.

Here are some quick pros and cons when you compare this to Tarkov. Keep in mind I haven't touched Tarkov in years.

Pros:

- Getting into games is instant
- You can stay in raid as long as you want - loot respawns during the storm
- Getting equipped after dying is comparatively quick and easy (still could use QoL updates though)
- No dumb, unnecessary mechanics such as thirst/energy, global trader stocks or gun jamming
- No quests designed by an absolute pepega
- No need to google the most basic pieces of information such as extract locations or ammo stats
- No item bloat
- Better map design in terms of gameplay
- Humane lightning, ambience and directional sound
- Arguably no P2W

Cons:

- Lacking in content
- Balance is all over the place right now
- Bullet spongy AI
- Gunplay could use refinement
- Not as immersive/atmospheric
- TTK a bit too high IMO, 1v3 is downright impossible most of the time

All in all, a more enjoyable experience than Tarkov already. Just hope this game won't get overwhelmed by cheating due to being F2P.

1.5 years later matchmaking is finally fixed it appears. I think rooms are still borked for me if set to same region which is not ideal since almost all the ones I get otherwise are from Asia.

Gameplay stays in the crazy fun but crazy challenging category. SNK should really stop shooting themselves in the foot though if they want that top 10 publisher worldwide sweetspot. It's a bit embarrassing how long it took them to get this up to speed.

ORIGINAL REVIEW from 2022.04.15:

Don't buy this - the matchmaking is still screwed 2 months in and the netcode has some flaws. It takes forever to find matches and the ones you do usually are 200-300 ms, despite being in EU. Other than that - you can't lab DLC characters without owning them which is still stupid even if it is the norm right now.

The gameplay itself is challenging but incredibly fun. Will gladly change my review if the outstanding issues are resolved, however the damage is already done.

Buy this only for the singleplayer and only at a decent discount.
GTA Online is built around monotonous grinding or microtransactions. Each update only makes it worse.
They also are killing modding.

♥♥♥♥ Take Two.

Well, the game came out finally (in name, anyway). Figured I'd update my lame, previously positive review for such an occasion, since I'm a bit bitter about the game.

Here's the gist of it - Squad, despite my bitterness, is still a pretty good game and definitely the best modern teamwork oriented PvP game of such scale, but... it doesn't really succeed it's spiritual predecessor - Project Reality. PR is still superior in the amount of content, the variety of maps/factions and, most importantly - the gameplay. If you hadn't played PR or are new to Squad, you'll probably have a lot of fun for a good amount of hours and then it'll be well worth the money.

But if you play for a while and pay attention to how the game is played, you will soon notice that the best way to play Squad right now is basically to just spam FOBs (spawnpoints) and throw bodies at the enemy FOBs. And it has been like this for a while. At some point a few years ago, the devs got complacent or started working on other projects in secret and started casualizing the game. The result of that was a mish mash of a game where they tried to appeal to every audience - the casuals, the people who wanted the original vision and the competitive crowd.

It's not all doom and gloom though. Recently, the lead game designer (Fuzzhead) was promoted to project lead and gained the control over game design decisions that he should have always had. He was always for pushing the game into teamwork oriented, punishing but rewarding gameplay but for some ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ reason was always overriden despite the lead game designer title. Only time will tell if they deliver on these promises and fix underlying issues.

To conclude, over the past 2 years of development OWI have erroded most of the goodwill they had built up prior but are showing good effort communicating their latest efforts with development.

TLDR: the company's wack, the game's wack (but maybe getting better), buy only on sale (but maybe not until another year at least) and don't play on free weekends if you value your own sanity.