Recent reviews by Sleepen

Hood is a fun... but flawed game.

The "stealth phase" is really fun!
It feels so damn satisfying to work together with your team! Helping each other assassinate or distract guards, opening up alternate routes for the team to use, scouting the enemies/objectives together. It really does feel like you're playing as a band of thieves. This is especially the case when playing with friends.

The "combat phase" is also kinda fun.
There's a fine balance between pressuring the objective, spawn control, and managing the positions of the guards that make this phase more engaging than I thought it'd be honestly. The combat itself isn't too complex, but it gets the job done and is fun for the most part. Again, playing with friends will improve your experience here with better coordination.

The classes feel fairly well balanced.
The combat can be kinda tough when you start out, but most of the things that I felt were imbalanced became less off an issue when my knowledge of the game improved. I've also seen many people complain about literally every class being too strong over the last few days and all of them are played very often, so that's a pretty good sign that all characters are viable if played well. Not saying imbalances don't exist, but you can perform well with everyone.

Unfortunately however, I did mention the game is flawed so here are some of those reasons...

Stealth isn't rewarded enough.
You can steal the key, open the vault, move the chest, and start extracting without anyone on your team being seen by a guard or player... yet the enemy team will still be told which phase of these you're currently on. It's not like you're being punished for being stealthy, but you sure don't feel like you're being very rewarded for it either. For a phase that is all about stealth and scouting handing a team such valuable information about the other team's progress for free feels very contradictory.

The combat phase eats the stealth phase and happens very suddenly.
As soon as both teams know where the objective is the pace of the game shifts drastically, sometimes this happens so quickly you barely get to experience the stealth phase of the game. Rather than sneak around like a band of thieves you will be bouncing between controlling spawn locations and controlling the objective. It's not that the combat phase isn't fun, it's just that it happens too quickly at the expense of the stealth phase... which in my opinion is more engaging and one of the main attractions of this game.

Some maps feel like just playing team deathmatch, with little consequence for failure.
Some maps are pretty small with the vault spawning around the same area every round and no extract points that favour either team. You're pretty much guaranteed to start the combat phase very quickly and it doesn't matter which team wins the chest tug of war, because the winning team can't punish the losing team by picking an extract point that favours their team.

Assassinations can be very frustrating.
The fact that the only requirement for an assassination is being crouched behind a player means you're gonna play against players that abuse it a lot.. Miss a swing in the middle of a duel? Guess you just die! Fighting against more than one player is especially frustrating when they're clearly focused on assassination, waiting for the inevitable moment when one of them can get behind you for the instant kill, as if being outnumbered wasn't enough of a disadvantage... right? The only real counter to this is being around teammates who can kill the person assassinating you before the animation ends, though one teammate often wont have the damage to kill them alone, so pray you're popular with all your teammates...

The winch can be frustrating.
It's very possible to dominate all game, getting the winch progress all the way to the last notch only for the enemy team to get a lucky fight and win the match by finishing it off. Some people enjoy this, since stealing the win isn't out of place in a game about thieves but others feel like it was done poorly is an unsatisfying mechanic. Either way, it's a very controversial mechanic and worth mentioning.

ADD TEXT CHAT!!!
You can use a communication wheel with basic options to talk to your team without voice chat, but text chat would be so much more useful.

There's other issues related to performance and some bugs here and there, nothing that can't be fixed... hopefully sooner, rather than later.

Personally, I'd recommend this game. I was pretty conflicted about the game for a while not gonna lie, but I'm glad I gave it the chance because I've ended up playing a lot and it has been a blast!

;_;

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