Recent reviews by HungarianPatriot

I was willing to give this game another chance, time and time again, because the promise of it feels like hand-crafted for me specifically, and it is quite literally the only game in its genre. Unfortunately, from day 1. the game started out, to put it simply, scummy, and cancerous. I always had my hopes up that it would improve over time, but instead of getting better, things have only gotten much worse.

The core concept of the game is good -very good. Design and build your own combat vehicles, and take part in fast-paced battles with them. Unfortunately, what is built upon this concept is a get-rich-quick scheme, designed to squeeze the money out of weak-willed imbeciles with a never-ending cycle of powercreep - FOMO - in-game planned obsolence:
Though -nominally- anything in the game is obtainable in a meager few years of grinding, the content which is the most powerful is always behind a soft paywall, once it reaches its quota of sales, gets nerfed to uselessness, and made obsolete by the next batch of content, therefore, free to play means that you are free to feed the whales who pay out the macrotransactions to enjoy the new content while it is gamebreakingly OP.

Quantitatively, even obtaining a low double-digit percentage of the game's content would take decades. Not because there is that much content, but because the free-to-play aspect is entirely nominal. Even for just a single, decent, mid-tier build with "legendary" weapons, grinding the parts will take MONTHS. Perfecting that same build so it has all the upgrades possible would take years. Grinding for a single top-of-the-line build with "relic" weaponry would take as much as FOUR TO TEN YEARS depending on the choice of weapons. Let me say it again. I'm talking about a SINGLE build. You have no creative freedom AT ALL, even though the promise of it is the main selling point of the game. You are either stuck with a single, mediocre, low-level build for months, or even years, being fodder for whales, or you hand over the price of a full game to get enough building materials for a better build, and enjoy it before it inevitably becomes obsolete due to power creep. Even if you were to sink thousands of dollars into the game, you would never have even a remotely similar experience to those Youtube promoters who own press accounts with a practically infinite amount of all resources and items in the game.

Gaijin employs paid shills. There was a time when the internal documents of their competitor, Wargaming, got leaked. The documents indicated that Wargaming demands of its employees to use sockpuppet accounts to shill both on the official forums and on other media, amongst other reasons, to counter the shilling of Gaijin employees doing the same. When the last time player economy got nerfed and old-time players started leaving negative steam reviews en masse, immediately, dozens of new Steam accounts with less than 20 hours of gametime started leaving positive reviews of only a few, usually meaningless words. Really makes you think...

And speaking of shills, anyone who utters the words "Crossout is not pay-to-win" is either that, played less than 100 hours and still is in the "honeymoon" period of the game's progression, or someone suffering from Stockholm syndrome from a scam they have sunk way too much money and time into to admit that it was a mistake. In essence, Crossout is a mobile game pretending not to be. Every single argument for Crossout NOT being pay-to-win boils down to "Ahchually you can gring for everything", conviniently forgetting that time is a limited resource, and even if the game did not have the powercreep-fomo-nerf cycle, grinding for years is only theoretically viable. But because the cycle very much exists, it is physically impossible to be anything close to competitive without circumventing the grind by paying.

The game has both PvP and PvE: both are de-facto mandatory parts of the grind. PvP is where players clash, some pwn with the newest battlepass or premium pack items of the month, while others get pwned. PvE is doing the same 4-6 missions every single day, it can and will bore the player to tears: its main purpose is to be tedious and time consuming, to discourage trying to get cruicial in-game resources by playing the game, and encourage getting them through the in-game market. This sink of in-game currency then can be filled by real money.

With every major udate, the player economy, outrageous from the start, gets nerfed even further in some way. In fact, the income of players got nerfed 3 times since the first iteration of this review was written. Everything written about the insane grind in this review can be expected to get even worse in the future.

The game's ELUA states that if your account is inactive for 3 years, it will be deleted and you are not eligible for any compensation. It also states that the staff can do whatever they want to you and don't even owe you an explaination. Naturally, staff abuse is rampant. You own nothing and you have no rights (and you will be happy). And you waiver your rights for a class action lawsuit by agreeing to it.

The matchmaker is rigged. Unlike WoT, which does it in a more subtle way, Crossout doesn't even hide it. Testing by multiple people has shown that it forces a 50% winrate. There is a video of it here: https://youtu.be/8e1r2b8G0hg (I might add that these people were whales, it's not hard to imagine that if you insist on playing for free, the ratio could be worse).

Cheating, while not exactly rampant, is present, especially in the form of aimbots, usually paired with hitscan weapons. The in-game report system is only for placebo. While I have never taken part in high-level clan wars, cheating is supposedly much more prevailent there, and in the case of some clans, it sancctioned by the developers either due to connections, or simply because the memebers of the cheating clans are whales of the highest order.

The game has no friendly fire, and no penalty whatsoever for putting teammates in harms way or outright harrassing them. Therefore, every match is chock-full of braindead morons who push teammates in front of enemies either on purpose or just by carelessness, or just drive into you at full speed while you are trying to line up a shot. The placebo report system doesn't even have an option for reporting people who grief their own teammates.

Quite frankly, the game's developers are scammers, parasites, and all around vile, predatory subhumans. Their "product", which can be called such in the same way low-quality narcotics can be called "product", is a shining example of how woefully underregulated the video game industry is. I have never seen a game with a more predatory monetization system, and I hope I never will.

Do yourself a favor and not only stay away from Crossout, but also from any other games made by Gaijin and Targem as well.

I love retro games. I also love story-driven single-player shooters. Half-Life 2 and its episodes are some of my all-time favourite games. I had high expectations for the legendary prequel, and couldn't resist buying it at 94% off. All that said, I've never player a more janky, piece of sh*t game than this one. Absolutely counter-intuitive map design. Giantic electric bolts between two huge Tesla coils? No problem, you go straight through, that's the right way. You touch a slowly rotating thing mechanical component from the side? Instantly dead. Touch a ragdoll on an elevator? Instantly dead. Blow up an Abrams tank with a single rocket and satchel charge. The Bradley IFV 50 meters ahead (a lighter armoured vehicle) seems to be unkillable no matter how many rockets you waste on it. The second Bradley later on can easily be killed.
Spent 20 minutes stuck in a vent, because a grille on it could be opened, but it would not let me squeeze through (despite the hole being obviously large enough). Turns out the right way was a ladder going next to a spinning fanblade which by all rights should have reached my body and killed me. Fall damage is ridiculous, mobs are stupidly tanky, and the game constantly throws situations at the player that WILL result in damage being taken, or outright death, unless the player has prior knowledge of the map. Sometimes even with prior knowledge: unavoidable fall damage and environmental damage are occasionally present - the staple of dogsh*t level design. Save scumming felt like an absolute must. Awkward movement makes platforming unnecessarily more annoying than it already is. The game is a consant stream of nonsense, outright unfair situations, and poor level design. Graphics and sound quality are obviously terrible, too, as to be expected from a game this old, but unlike many of its peers, it has no redeeming charm to its artstyle or sound design, or gunplay or AI, for that matter.

The heist looks good, and has a good theme, and has good mechanics, yet it's extremely tedious and unfun in stealth, due to the map design. Continuously streaming guards mandate that the player waits minutes for just about every room or corridor crossing, as there is no way to get past them in most of the tight places lacking anything to hide behind. The guards lack of radio traffic, flashlights, or anything to indicate their presence besides barely audible footsteps, the myriad of blind corridors and turns, and their stationary positions being many times deliberately put in places where you can't see them from outside the room, but from where they'll immediately detect you once you are inside, also mandates using sixth sense before entering most rooms, adding yet more waiting time for even the simplest tasks. All this artificially inflate the time required for an otherwise rather short heist by magnitudes, and turn completion into an utter chore.

In loud, choosing the helicopter escape is pretty much mandatory, as the insane amount of cop spawns and relative lack of cover around the van escape make securing loot next to impossible on higher difficulties.

Amazing atmosphere, both in the way of graphical and sound design. Multiplayer gameplay, though not very varied or tactically deep, is somewhat enjoyable much in the same way as other horde shooters, such as Left 4 Dead or Payday are. The selection of weapons is adequate, if still somewhat small, and is further narrowed down by the obvious underpoweredness of some and clear superiority of other weapons. There is little room for improvement here, though, as the only Terminator-grade weapon from WH40K that is not in the game are the Chainfist Gauntlets. Enemies come in a greater variety, and have different strengths and weaknesses, which requires some strategic thinking both on the level of individual players, and the team as a whole. Objectives are greatly varied. Singleplayer is simply trash, without most of these positive qualities.

In multiplayer, judicious amount of sheer bullsh*t, such as somwhat tanky, fast, and almost completely invisible enemies that can one or two hit kill you and come in groups, psykers that can oneshot kill you with a hitscan attack from a hundred meter away, heavy stubbers (the WH40K equivalent of an airsoft rifle) destroying your Terminator armor with 5-6 shots, or RNG-driven "critical hits" that cannot be parried and will wound or kill you no matter what are something that you will have to put up with if you wish to play on higher difficulties, which is necessary to gain any meaningful amount of XP and unlock customizations and upgrades at a bearable rate. Good situational awareness can negate these threats most of the time, but death still comes, often, and suddenly, be prepared that this game is not a power fantasy.

Unfortunately, Space Hulk Deathwing is clearly unfinished, even with the Enchanted Edition, the UI is laughably unpolished and the game is infested with bugs (and I do not mean the genestealers), but to be fair, most outright gamebreaking ones are fixed. The netcode is a whole different story though, it is highly unstable, and will likely give you massive lagspikes (freezes) and hit detection issues, if not just throw you off of whichever server you are playing on right away.

There is no mod support in the game. No multiplayer bots, so you either get people to join your server, or you will be playing alone. No voice chat. Very barebones radial command menu. Barely functional server browser. You get the point, core functionality is either outright missing, or just implemented in a half-arsed way. Non-core, "quality of life" functionality is unheard of.

Adding insult to the inury, the developers declared that they are done with the game, and since the release of the Enhanced Edition, there is no official support of any kind to speak of, and they have completely abandoned the game and its community.

Regardless, even in this state, Deathwing is an OK horde shooter carried to the occasional moments of glory by its setting in the 40K universe, and indeed, it is the best WH40K themed shooter at the moment. Due to its great many flaws, and the audacity of the developers to flip off the community in such a way, I cannot recommend it at a full price, however, if it's on a discount, say, -50% at least, consider grabbing it.

Ah, Garry's mod. Where do I begin? The game not what it once was. Many gamemodes are completely dead, and the game is at death's door, but while it lived, what a game it was! People building spaceships, tanks, or just goofing around and posing ragdolls in lewd poses. Using wiremod to make complex electronic devices, working computers, GPUs. Cringe roleplay, juvenile fun, serious building, everyone could find what suited them and have a good time. Even today, fun can be had, if not as much as in years past. And despite the dvindling community, Garry's Mod continues to push the boundaries. Genial people have made things such as infinite maps, almost 1:1 maps of the entire solar system, pocket dimensions that can be moved around like physical objects... I always say, if something exist, it was or will be ported into GMod. This game never got as much attention as it deserved.