Recent reviews by Dane ツ

My review for smite 1 can mostly be copy pasted for this. Once it came out I was genuinely thinking about supporting it with a positive review, but a couple of hours playing and you're reminded it's the same bad game by the same garbage company, nothing changed. Same braindead decisions and garbage matchmaking, the only difference is now you get FPS drops from 150 to 55 and there's plenty of bugs, broken UI and missing features everywhere you look.

The only way to play it is still premade with friends, otherwise you are at the mercy of getting partied up with someone who has 5 games played total. If the game knows I played thousands of games in smite 1, and knows I have 30+ rank X gods, why is it putting me in games with people who installed the game yesterday?
No amount of reddit replies and "Titan Talk"s on YouTube will ever change anything, you can try and try to connect to your community but that will never change the fact you are re-releasing 12 year old gods and still somehow manage to make them unbalanced. After 12 years of data and balancing you still manage to make a 'new' god have a bigger winrate than release Guan Yu. Mind boggling.

Also the ego of smite players needs to studied, the gap between skill and ego is astronomical. Players will choose to lock in a DPS role even when they see that the rest of their team already did that, and that they require a support role, and then get mad that they keep getting stomped since they don't have a frontline. Kind of fitting that in a game about playing gods everyone thinks they are the best and are clashing egos, huh.

Braindead system. Braindead company. Braindead players.

I'll probably keep playing like I did with smite 1, but cannot recommend it to anyone sane.
While it's best played premade beware that the game has some effect that will make your friends also lose braincells and become retarded, it's simply a curse that affects everyone who touches this game.

EDIT AFTER v1.0: I have to change it to a "no", the rest of the review stays but the game still has issues. Even on the appropriate server you still have a noticeable delay (feels like 200+ ms) and FPS tanks down to 30 late-game.

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A direct upgrade to the original Warcraft 3 map, with a lot more features, and in active development. While the nature of the game is quite repetitive and leads you to eventually only use that 1 top tier strategy, they combat this by having multiple maps, multiple difficulties along with random element mode and chaos mode (random creep abilities) and special challenges.
There are way too many features to list here, just read up the official game 'About' section.

Cons:
- Poor FPS. This might be because Vsync is forced on, but for such a simple game I expected a lot more FPS. As it currently stands you'll get less than 60 FPS during later waves when a lot of towers are active.
- (Edit: It has a lot more players post-release) Not enough players. While this is not a true con it is a thing to consider. Though by buying and playing you're combating this issue.
- Latency in online games. High input latency won't screw you that much in a Tower Defense game but it's still off-putting to see it present even in 1-man online games.

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Recommended to anyone who is a fan of Tower Defense games, or the original Element TD.

Started playing this game in May 2013 (Beta), back then it wasn't yet on steam. I have seen almost every change that was made and every patch that progressively made the game worse than ever before. Note that I am just a normal player, like any other person, so my opinion is my own, but some things here are facts.

Their terrible security is a whole other thing to the point where players have to create countless posts to complain how they got f*cked over.

Their forum had a section for PC Support, in it every post was labeled with “Unanswered” (red font) or “Answered” (green font). Their average solved posts were 1 in 20, or 1 per page. You had pages upon pages of unsolved cases, no Hi-rez employee to look at them, no official to look at your problem. Lately they changed that and now you can no longer look at the red sea of pages. I should have taken a screenshot while I could. Luckily it can still be found here:
Link[forums.smitegame.com]
I also took a screenshot just so it doesn’t get lost in time.
Link[prntscr.com]
You can also look it up here:
Link[web.archive.org]

Hi-rez ignores many suggestions that people have shown they love, more than once.

Now enough about that. Let’s start with the game.
But wait, that is that? You can’t even launch it? Too bad mate.
Countless issues with the game itself that isn’t even gameplay is just incredible, errors popping left and right.
This alone makes people give up on the game before they even tried it.
Now if you are able to get past the launcher and press “play” to launch the game you might be greeted with offline servers, don’t worry, it’s a common thing. Maybe it won’t let you log in. After you log in you must wait on that “game data” and those lagging logos. Now you are in the game and you enter the queue.
Now for the matchmaking of SMITE.

It is one of the worst I have ever seen in any game so far. People are asking for a better matchmaking system since release, and it has only gotten worse. God forbid you play late at night, you (level 100+) will be matched with people who are level 15-70 easily. I guess it’s good because you get a free win…
Just searching on Google for SMITE’s bad matchmaking will give countless posts of people complaining. The ranked matchmaking is even worse where people who are gold will get matched against silver, bronze, platinum, diamond, grandmaster, but never against gold, making it either impossible to win or winning in 10 minutes.

When the Accept button pops up you are blown away by the loud noise, your ears now bleeding (still a thing in 2021). The sound plays a couple of more times, for no reason. If you entered the MOTD you might not be able to pick a god, because every god is “Crossed out” for no reason. (Also the MOTD match counter in your profile is bugged for like 2+ years) This now leaves you with a 30 minutes ban because you “didn’t” pick a god.
While you wait for those 30 minutes you can go to the gods sections and choose a god, if you look at its model you can how beautifully his/her armor clips into his/her arm/leg/body/head. Quality animations (s). Now you look at those skins -- 99% exclusive.

Hi-rez will work on a god and skin one time, and never again will they put a lot of effort into it. Leave it at its release-state. If you try to play the dance animation the god will clip into the floor, just a little (depends on the god and the type of animation). They lack consistency, I can’t express with words how little consistency they have, it’s nonexistent. And to top it all of is the biggest irony ever in the history of the human kind – on their site and on one of the maps they have the sentence “Quality needs consistency”. You can’t start to understand how ironic that is, it’s actually sad.

I’ll list some things they haven’t finished but started:
Voicepacks
Their forum (they don’t even use it)
Their official site (outdated information all over the site)
Mastery cards
Mastery skins
There are many more...

For every god there is something missing, not complete, or ignored. Visual glitches from 2014 haven’t been fixed to this day, they keep being ignored and skins are being pushed out because they must make profit on this dying game. Their previous games have failed for a reason, and so will this one, in fact it already has because they are using desperate measures to keep the game alive.
The game is not worth playing alone, or at least not if you are looking to win your games.

Now for the balance in SMITE.
No MOBA game is perfectly balanced, but SMITE is not even close, they are on a whole other level of unbalanced. They chose the wrong way to go about making a new MOBA that will have this above-shoulder view. And it failed. Making a MOBA with that camera view is challenging enough, and for them to think they can handle it is foolish.
Countless gods are made to 1-shot everything and anything. The jungle camps can be cleared with 1 skill, the waves can be cleared with 1 skill. The waves which are supposed to be the main foundation of a MOBA can be cleared in 2 seconds. The towers don’t protect you, they deal 40 damage to Guardians and really any other role you buy 1 defensive item on. The roles mean nothing, a warrior can tank, clear the wave, zone, peel, jungle, have CC and damage all at the same time and nothing is stopping them. Because of all of this bad balance the nicely balanced Supports (Different than a Guardian) are not ever played, because they don’t have damage, they can’t 1v1 anyone, they are weak, have worse CC than Warriors, Hunters and Mages. There are little to no gods with complicated mechanics that one could master and be good with, every god shares a skill with some other. A line skill, an AoE skill, a jump/leap/dash. Half of the gods have them. No originality. They are now pushing out patches just so it seems like they are working on the game.

If they don’t want/know how to fix something they will just remove it from the game. A simple proof to the fact that they don’t know what they are doing is that they make a change, and then reverse it in 1 or 2 patches, this has happened multiple times.

The rest of the review can be read at
http://pastebin.com/77NNwufc

With the last major update coming out There is another update coming 😎 Meaning this game has received free updates for over 10 years. It's safe to this is the best game in its genre. The item variety is astounding to the point where you're likely to still find new items after 500 hours of playtime. There are 4 difficulties and 3 character types, making this game playable by anyone in any way. QoL features in this game make it that much more enjoyable. It also has full Steam Workshop support so you can tailor the game to your liking.

Tons of different weapons that make class-specific playthroughs possible, tons of potions from those that increase enemy spawn rate to those that increase your block placement speed or change your gender, NPCs with unique items, Bosses, the ability to have 6 accessories that can each have a modifier further increasing your character's ability. Wings to fly. Mounts, Pylons and teleporters that make traversing the world easy. Armor and vanity slots. Dye slots for each peace of gear you can equip (there are over 100 different dyes). Pets that follow you. Pets as NPCs. Different biomes, corrupt version of those biomes, all split across Space-Surface-Underworld-Cave-Hell layers with unique enemies. The ability to create your own biomes with enough blocks of a certain type.

The list goes on and on, with too many features to list. Terraria Wiki will be your best friend and you'll probably spend hours reading it.

While there are bugs they are far few in between and the core gameplay is polished. Performance is good with FPS capped to 60, only going below in really intense situation.
Multiplayer works well and supports a ton of players.

Characters and worlds are all separate so you can enter any world with any character.
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The bad:
- Master mode is not really a rewarding difficulty to play on as the core items of the game aren't balanced for such huge scaling in enemy HP and damage. This makes a lot of items obsolete if you wanna have an easier time, which ties in with the next point
- A lot of items in this game are straight up not useful, or too weak when compared to other. This means that you'll fall into a META if you want to be efficient, where you'll use the same items in every playthrough (with some variation).
Edit: The latest update fixed a lot of these balance issues, but it's still not perfect.
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And this is all without mods which there are plenty. Mods that add double the content make this game replayable for hundreds of hours more.

The price of the game is more than worth for how much gameplay there is.
Overall a 10/10 game, must-have game made by amazing developers.