Recent reviews by JackWagon

Easily my GOTY for 2024 so far.

Pro's
* Solid firefight mechanics.
* High quality community. Even PUG's are pretty darned solid.
* No tie-in's to the real world. Similarities? Vaguely. Direct tie-in's? Nope.
* Difficulty scales well with skill.
* Squad communications requirement is fairly heavy on higher difficulties.
* Surprisingly deep general game mechanics (ricochet, firearm reloads, enemy AI).
* Active development and communicative development team / CEO.
* They are not making the game easier and buffing commonly used weapons.
* Warbonds are purchasable with "super credits" and you are not forced to grind for them, they occur without player stress and are not something you need to burn a lot of time pursuing.
* The campaign does a fine job of making you feel involved in a real community effort to pursue goal. Even if Joel is there to crush your hopes and spirits.

Con's
* You exist in a game world that Joel does, and he loathes your existence.
* Squad communications requirement is fairly heavy on higher difficulties.
* In-Game friends list a little buggy.
* Steam Deck, while playable, could use some more love to keep it at a solid framerate, and make some of the in-mission text readable.

Used to be an amazing game, especially with a few friends but it's broken in early 2024 and Arrowhead (dev's) / Paradox (the publisher) seem to have abandoned it.

If you're willing to run code that doesn't come from the game / the official developers, there's someone that's been working to get the game stable again on Github (check steam discussions for this game and there are plenty of folks posting the link).

Kudo's to that person working to get it working again, but shame on Arrowhead (dev's) / Paradox (the publisher) for not supporting a game they still have no trouble taking your money for.

Love the ongoing updates!

2023/04/08 - Almost at Season 3 and the UI is still garbage, game mode selections are the same mid experience you get with any past CoD (better than Season 0 / 1, but still, meh.). Game is still the only game I play that crashes. Hundreds and thousands of hours spent on other titles with nary a crash, this game, crashfest.

2022/12/14 - Update for Season 1, prior to Reloaded: Still crashes a good amount. Still very limited on the game mode selections. UI is still absolutely horrible to work with.

Still cannot save weapon builds (loadouts are somewhat glitchy overall with naming).

Shoot House is decent, more restrictive a map than MW2019.

ORIGINAL REVIEW: Current state? Mediocre. Will it be good? Absolutely, but make no real mistake, this is a game still in progress of development.

It's fun. There isn't a lot of depth to the multiplayer (few and somewhat underpopulated maps). Game modes are pretty standard fare, and they lock you out of being able to pick a map you enjoy and a specific game mode (per usual).

They sold out to Epic, dropped pre-existing support for Linux / Mac platforms, Steam Workshop...a laundry list.

Don't forget that they did this in the future when fancy new titles drop and have their name associated with it.

Ton's of fun, feels like like a big world, firmly a roguelike elemental game while keeping forward momentum through a story.

This is pretty essential in my view. Giving you well integrated visibility into performance at the turn of a wrist. This is not to say you cannot accomplish that without this, but this is far more flexible insofar as becoming available to you flexibly and reliably while you interact with the environment.

What a fun little game. Seriously. Nicely polished. It's not huge by any means, but the price isn't either. Great little Halo fix on the PC. Also works very well on Windows 8.x Tablets (which is where I originally purchased and played, the Windows\Microsoft Store version however does require some microtransactions).

One of the most "emotional" shooters I've ever played.

Frankly a very normal FPS in terms of actual gameplay. Not bad, not amazing and groundbreaking.

But the story. That story.

Hit's hard, stays interesting and just plain consistently gives you a rollercoaster ride all the way through.

Awesome time suck. Non-Violent (although disasters happen). The state of the game has been evolving at a steady rate and things that were previously only available as an add-on Mod, are becoming built in.

It can be frustrating due to lack of instructions, and the tutorial is also pretty lacking. Ship building is also a little on the unintuitive side, but that will evolve over time I believe.

The recent introduction of "Science" is very welcome and fun to work through.

I'm really hoping that Multi-Core processor support works out as there are performance issues with things as they stand, no matter how powerful your computer.

I will update this in the future.