Recent reviews by Rajhin

Really no other story of sticking with the game after the launch in the modern gaming history, I'd say.
The game released to insane hype due to overpromise and suffered in reception tremendously. What if I said the studio surpassed far beyond what they promised originally that produced so much hype to begin with?

All through free updates. Kudos.

Addictive so far, the skill ceiling is high enough that high ranked players can be untouchable to low rank players.

Somehow makes me think of For Honor casual fighting game more than a football game, but it's still a very good jump-in-and-out FIFA without any gacha and time waste.

Not many round based competitive games out at the moment.

This is Valorant alternative, but not as slow and not as afraid of RPG abilities, very comparable to R6 in ability power where the ability is often what wins the round, not just aiming.

The crash cards mechanic is notable.
The game retains competitive feeling even when you consider crazy effect of said roguelike cards affecting the rounds every time. You don't really come out feeling the enemy only won the game because they had good cards, only that you failed to understand them or play around them.

Very well optimized, as long as you are not one of the people affected by crashes.

The few bad things I can outline are: Naive character writing in the worst traditions of Apex legends, except it's even less coherent as it's Chinese attempt at western stylistic; and also an annoying monetization strategy bordering mobile game tricks. Monetization is bad not because it's expensive - the prices are mainline with other PC F2P shooters, maybe even more generous, but ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ there's a lot of leaning into trying to capture you into daily activity and quests overloading with currencies and tasks to complete. Totally ignorable, though, just not well structured for my taste.

Conclusion: I really hope it doesn't die after 6 months, this is a good hero round based shooter.

The best VR open world driving has to offer for now.
Just enough of the world to give you a longing night roadtrip for an hour or two, but condensed enough to give you new sceneries for each few sessions.

Purely a review for the Operations - the extraction shooter part of the game.

It's basically a mix of Modern Warfare gameplay core with ECONOMY of Tarkov.
Which means it's a fast paced and easy to play shooter with complicated background part of the game that provides cost and reward for playing similar to Tarkov. Which is a good thing, in my eyes. You have to spend a lot to prep for a match and even health system forces you to keep a score of different medical equipment, but USING all the kits, items and ammo is simple.

The incentive and wonder of finding expensive things is there, the survival and immersive aspect of Tarkov is not. It also means an expensive kit will beat a cheap one. Do with this information what you will. In my eyes it just makes this game a fun economy MMO with goals to chase and loot to enjoy. But it also means you won't replace your Tarkov shaped hole in your heart with this game, it's simply a nice remix on an extraction shooter that Tarkov fans might enjoy.

I dig the change of pace, and even if you don't consider it's only really a change for the beginning of the game, not end game.
Most issues people share about not enjoying loot or classes is a build problem in reality. It's just that you can't play as thoughtlessly as POE2 is not a solved game yet.

There's a lot of formats to play which seems like too much at first, but if you were afraid of it being too overwhelming for a newbie - a lot of formats only exist to make it as limited and non-powercreepy as possible for the new player's sake.

The game has A LOT of expansions in it now, if you wanted to collect very specific decks or cards you remember form paper - it's probably possible.

At the same time it's got even more online-exclusive cards that don't exist in print you can play with in certain formats.

In short, the strength of this game is the size of historic card library, all the possible combinations of formats that allow / disallow sets of cards for either most freedom or most balance and then the amount of players that populate all of those formats so there's no issue finding opponents with very different decks.

I don't even try to construct the most meta decks, I just slowly collect specific themes for pure roleplay in the deck, pick a format that isn't too permissive (to avoid meeting super overpowered historical decks) and have enough fun with that alone.

Competent release and the meat of the game is very good.

But very light on content, all things considered. If right now it's a mostly recommended review, a year of the roadmap should turn this into strongly recommended review.

As long as this game doesn't cost the same as a AAA title to you, it's gonna be good value buy.

Good adaptation. Can't wait for the rest of the expansions.

I like it now.

Previously I felt COH2 vs COH3 was not a clear cut choice when COH3 was released so undercooked I skipped it even after playing COH2 for 1k hours, but the game is now shaped up enough to make COH2 obsolete, I was happy to finally move on to this one.