Recent reviews by Grishyy

When this released in 2012, I enjoyed it. A bit egregious with the monetisation but otherwise a good large-scale FPS sandbox. Not really anything like it. Battles featuring 1000+ players across 3 factions fighting over key objectives. The Battlefield franchise could only DREAM of achieving this scale.

In 2025 the game is dead. It can't reach even a twentieth of the battle scale it's trying to achieve. Many multiplayer indie games have come and gone with higher player counts. Some older servers have been shut down or merged in order to consolidate player counts, and it's still not enough to make the game engaging.
The monetisation is worse than ever. And despite however much money the game has generated, old performance and networking issues from 2012 still linger today.

It's time for the developers to move on, make Planetside 3, and hopefully learn from the mistakes they made with this title over the last 12+ years.

Nothing about this game is multiplayer. Sure, you can see other players in the world, and you can talk to them. But there's no real interaction. You don't trade with players. You don't team up with players. There's no real group activities. There's no PvP. This game could easily have been offline singleplayer and nothing would change.

The majority of the items you craft exist only to be sold to vendors. There's no value to them. There's no market for them. There's no real use to them. You craft item, then you sell item. You don't craft better items that players will want to use or trade for. There is no supply or demand for the items you craft. So crafting serves no purpose other than to make some easy money, of which you'll spend money on some gear upgrades from vendors, but you can easily get those upgrades as drops from things you kill.

Combat is extremely boring. There is only a single combat stat to focus on, and it's literally a numbers game. Is your combat number higher than the enemy combat number? You're guaranteed to win (unless you're extremely unlucky or extremely stupid). Combat is instanced, so once you finish a fight, you can just go straight into the next fight and you're already at full health and buffed. Other players can not interfere with your fights in any way (again, might as well be singleplayer).

The world isn't entirely open, but rather comprised of small rooms. Imagine the instanced rooms of Guild Wars, but on a much smaller scale. Walking down the main street of a town is broken down into 6 different rooms. It is extremely linear, and very little freedom of movement or direction.

Each major zone functions as a "chapter" in the game's story, but also as a fraction of your total skills. None of your skills carry over between zones. You'll learn 5 skills in 1 zone, but none of them are valid in the next zone. THIS ALSO APPLIES TO YOUR COMBAT LEVEL. Each zone has it's own unique combat level, meaning you're basically starting a fresh new character in each new zone you enter. There are plans to start making zones that will require multiple skills you've learned in previous zones, but this is not in the near future, as the developer only recently expressed interest in this idea.

Overall, it's very much a game where nothing you do matters. It's an extremely linear game, stripped of all freedoms and choice, no real "RPG" elements, no interaction with other players, and is undeserving of the title MMORPG.

It also includes AI research tools to learn from player chat and gameplay, which is also very concerning.

Not ready yet. Needs more time in the oven.
Could be good, but needs a lot of work.

-No renewable resources, so you rely on tearing down buildings just to upgrade your base.
-No way to construct new buildings, so if you've torn down the buildings around you for resources, you're left with no room to expand within your base.
-No elevation, everything is flat. This especially causes issues with sight lines when your squads are defending your base.
-No biomes / climates. Everything has the appearance of an Eastern European ex-Communist state, right down to weather, landscape, and structural architecture. It feels weird choosing an area in sunny Australia and seeing a cold, temperate landscape. Very immersion-breaking.
-Communications that slow the game to the lowest speed (but not pausing it), so the game still ticks by while you're playing around with the communications screen and unable to order squads around while this is happening, wasting time. The game doesn't set back to the previous speed you had it after the communications are over. This affects pacing.
-Unit pathfinding is very poor. Sometimes squads and zombies will decide to swim through water rather than take the bridge next to them, even though the bridge is faster.
-The in-game time is very unusual and/or inconsistent. It'll take my squad 3 hours to walk a street that only takes me 5 minutes IRL. I also survived 50 days in one sitting, but the game started in 2029 and ended in 2033. Are days just entire months now? Or is it meant to be months? This needs to be presented more clearly in-game.

As for general polish of the game, something that really irritated me was being unable to have my squad target zombies out in the open. I'd right-click on the zombies but my squad would instead just walk to the location rather than attack. This was a repeating issue, and cost me 2 squads on separate occasions.
It would also be nice to clearly see lootable items on the ground and have my squad specifically target those items to pick up, rather than click past just so my squad can loot items off the ground as they walk past.

After 6 hours of playing, it definitely feels like a mobile game in it's current state. If they want this to be played more seriously (as you should expect for a strategy/town builder/survival game) then it really needs a lot of work. I've outlined the issues that frustrated me the most, but there are likely more issues that other people have mentioned.

Can't rebind controller. On a game that was originally designed FOR a controller.
Very disappointed in these developers.

People forget that when CS:GO first launched, everyone hated it because it had some very minor problems. These got fixed, and it became the most popular competitive shooter on PC.
Take this into consideration before you give up on CS2.

My original review was positive, and I had a lot of hope for the game.
But it's been out for nearly a year and not a whole lot has changed to actually improve the game.
And for some reason the devs thought it was a good idea to increase the price of their incomplete game.

Just wait until the finished product. It's not worth it in it's current state.

Firstly, I write this review as someone who knows nothing about WH40K lore, and come into this looking for a classic boomer shooter.
As far as boomer shooters go, this is barely good. It's not bad, but it has a lot of faults, like the devs haven't learned from the other classic shooters that have released in the last 30 years (since Doom first released).

The biggest issues with this include:
-AI don't telegraph attacks properly, some attacks are instant.
-AI will pre-fire a quarter-second before you turn a corner, guaranteeing you take a hit before you even see the enemy.
-The devs aren't fully aware of each monster's mechanics or difficulty. Frequently there'll be monster closets that open upon grabbing a key or entering a room, and there'll be maybe 3 blue demons, posing 0 actual challenge and leaving me wondering why even bother having them there.
-Difficulty scaling is rather inconsistent. Some early arenas are much more difficult than later arenas or boss fights.
-Weapon upgrades aren't clear in what they do. There's 3 bolter ammo upgrades, all of which do very similar functions of "Make bolter stronger temporarily". There's another upgrade that just "buffs" the damage of a specific weapon for the rest of that level, sometimes it's more damage, sometimes it's a bigger magazine, or it's both. Hard to tell sometimes.
-There's a solid variety of weapons, but very little reason to use most of them. The shotgun can be removed and I wouldn't notice.

There's also no longevity with the game, other than to play it again on a higher difficulty. Considering my first playthrough was on Hard difficulty, and found most of the game to be rather easy, I don't think there's much more I can play beyond that.
With regards to longevity, the game really needs either a map editor tool with workshop support to create and share maps with other players, or a multiplayer deathmatch mode. Either of these would easily bump up my rating of the game.

tldr; needs more time in the oven

Game is far from ready.

It's a bare-bones early access game, with placeholder UI, barely functional features, no balance, regular recurring frame stutters, and dodgy gameplay. Could barely even be considered a "proof of concept". It also has a number of quality issues that you'd expect from early Unreal Engine 4 games. Like they haven't learned from successes and failures from the last decade of games.

As for the concept of the game itself, it tries to follow in the footsteps of games like Natural Selection 2 or C&C Renegade (now RenegadeX), but can't match neither the pace of gameplay, the depths of play / counterplay, nor the playercount for decent games.

I want to enjoy the game because I do enjoy FPS/RTS hybrid games when they're executed well, and I know there is some potential for the developers to turn this into something good, but that might take another 2 years to happen, and better FPS/RTS hybrids will likely release in that time.

It's watered-down Civ meets watered-down CK2. All I can taste is water.

Having been experienced with both games (mainly Civ 5), I was so utterly confused by the game that my 4 hours of play time were spent in the tutorial trying to figure it out. It's just not quite right.

Imagine DayZ, but worse in every way.