Recent reviews by Fracto

It's times like this where I wish there was a "meh" sideways thumb direction. The game play is much improved to me. With my setup I get a good solid frame rate, but my friend does not. He will be cruising at 100+ FPS and then drop to 40-50 for no reason.

The UI is mostly bad. There's some things I like about it but most things are a downgrade over the old game. Especially the equipment menu, the one you'll be utilizing most of the time you're playing the game to build out loadouts on your hunters. Every time you select a slot to put an item into it it pulls up the menu of the equipment or guns and populates the slot with your selection. However in the old iteration of the game you had a list that you could select from that would populate the equipment into the slot that was highlighted, a much more seamless and faster method of build out. It also pulls you out of whatever menu you're in and dumps you back in the lobby when you have someone join your party or populate into the party from an end-raid state. Skin selection is slightly better in that you lock in a skin but you can't use the same charm on multiple guns, which is weird and stupid.

The entire UI seems like its designed to be navigated with a D-Pad which makes no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sense for a PC game. It's like they hired a UI designer from some console developer who can only think in sliding tiles that are too big for some reason. The UI ends up feeling clunky, overly complex, requiring too many keypresses and menu transitions to operate a much simpler function that was much more intuitive from the old UI.

That said one of the biggest issues I had with the old game was an awful reconnect feature that hardly worked and when it did, usually bugged out somehow requiring multiple reconnects and the eventual loss of your hunter from raid ending. While my friend disconnected a couple times he was at least able to get back into the game quickly and easily. That might have something to do with the new engine, which is a welcome change.

All in all if Crytek can fire whoever did this UI redesign and do a refinement of the old UI it would be a vast improvement over this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ dumpster fire. This is one of my most played and favorite games ever, it deserves a good UI that isn't clunky and ♥♥♥♥♥♥ feeling.

Also, the old maps need to come back.

Some reviewers have criticized the developers of KCD for being lacking in their capacity to fix bugs and issues with their game. I can personally attest to their capacity to fix problems with their game, given you actually tell them you have a bug and send them log and save files to work with.

My game was crashing to desktop after about 50 hours of playtime, just silently crashing after about 10-20 minutes of playtime. After an email to their QA department they had me send them a few files to reproduce the bug. They then rolled out a fix for my issue in patch 1.8.3 and the fix actually worked, my game is working and what I thought was a corrupted save is fine and playable.

Regardless of how much I like the game the mere fact that a developer would actually respond in less than 48 hours to my specific issue with their game, not with some canned response or stupid tech support suggestions, but with a real fix, to the actual game, is amazing to me. I'm incredibly impressed with the response Warhorse has for the quality of their game and their player's experience.

Game's great, buy it. I'm gonna buy their next game no questions asked too.

Pros:

Guns work.
Fast gameplay.
Competitive gaming mindset.
Bunnyhopping to zone.
Looting and gunning not looting and looting and looting...
One armor level.
Good cosmetics that are easy to get and don't require keys.
Crates that open and work the first time.
No prone.
Has a firing range.

Cons:

TTK is a bit too high.
FPS could be better.
No shoulder look.
Nades are ♥♥♥♥♥♥.
Draw distance on buildings makes them look like ♥♥♥♥♥♥ brown sponges.

I recommend this game if you want a competitive shooter BR.

I can't believe they're actually still selling this game, and for a sale at that. What the ♥♥♥♥ is their problem? This game has been dead for over a year. There's no one playing and no dedicated servers available to play on.

My actual play time on this game is over 1600 hours.

This game is excellent, it's a great concept, great design, great art, and has great balancing (mostly). The thing it lacks is player count. The average player knowledge of the game is... lacking. This is true even in the highest levels of ranked play as it's entirely possible for very new players to be placed in games with the best players in the world (or at least the region). This is entirely because the game benefits players who go on small win streaks in their quialifing matches with too much elo and then places them in matches where, in order to cut down on match queue length, the game places people together with widely varying elo ranges.

If all you're really looking for is casual play with some variation on the MOBA style, this is a great game. If you're looking for a game with a very competitive ranked play mode, you're going to be somewhat disapointed. There's tons of casual modes to choose from, Arena, Joust, Siege, and Assault are all outside the realm of the 3 lane MOBA map with slight tweaks to the mentality of the game. These modes all have strengths and weaknesses, and are one of Smite's biggest faults. These modes are all fairly imbalanced as a result of the game being balanced around Conquest, however the game presents Arena as the premiere game mode, leaving Conquest and its meta a mystery to the newer player. This is because the meta changes often in the premiere game mode as a result of balancing changes to buff timers and camp spawns, something that's changed multiple times over various Conquest map incarnations.

I'd say pick up Smite, have fun with it, and enter ranked play if you really want to try hard, but don't expect people to know what they're doing or what gods or items do until you get really, really high in ranking, because the player base just isn't there, and what is there is mentally challenged on multiple levels more often than not.