Recent reviews by Justice

This game is an early access title. That means, crashes, performance issues, audio issues, keymappings that are not mappable or shown, etc.

This is their Hail Mary to get this game properly tested and get the feedback they need to make this game the greatest it can be. It's rough right now. Know that coming into it. But it is playable and more importantly, a FUN coop experience with your friends.

This review is coming from the POV of someone whos played only the PVE mode, Joint Ops with at least a second person to run with in the jungle, but if you are a solo player, this game offers a great challenge for you in particular with cracked out AI at times and tanking NPCs.

I have not played the PVP portion yet, because I am not a fan of 'die twice and your body disappears' mechanic, which the devs did address in a recent video. This impacts the people winning PVP fights who can't loot right away due to third parties and PVE bots. It doesn't sound like a fun experience, so I am going to wait until this mechanic is fleshed out before I play PVP.

I would describe this as a new Tarkov like open world experience. It is refreshing to play a tactical shooter and 'extraction' type game where you don't have to sit in menus for hours during your session or waiting in a queue. They keep you in the game immersed almost 100% of the time, aside when you go into menus to talk to vendors, but from what I have read, that is bound to change eventually as well where you are going up to talk to them instead. The little birds taking you into the field is still one of the best experiences they have added to the formula imo.

I would liken the experience more to playing Arma on TKoTH with constant transports flying people in and out of the battlefield. When the sessions have a bunch of players, just watching the activity going on in a base is great to see.

[FEEDBACK] I'd like to see variety added to the transports. Maybe at higher levels you have blackhawks come in and let you fast rope down for the insertion. Maybe you have Chinooks take larger groups at a time. They could do some REALLY cool ♥♥♥♥ with this mechanic.

Medical systems are huge in this game, they seem to be even more involved than their predecessors. You should focus on not getting hit too much because you could start bleeding out fast if you take sustained injuries. Which will put you into acoma at which point your buddy has to quickly plug up your wounds and revive you, then give you a blood bag or two to get you right again. Healing feels rewarding in itself as well.

Gunplay leaves something to be desired. Animations seem to be placeholder as they are quite rigid at the moment. I could see some polish being added to the weapon play and animations over time. Impact of weapons doesn't seem as much as it should be. AI now react a bit more to being shot, but there is a slight delay it feels like compared to other games (see Ready or Not bullet impact reaction by AI), The sound of shooting is good, but the reports of fire are pretty generic, you can tell the difference between sub and rifle, but past that, not really unless you are holding the gun and shooting it.

AI seems to tank rounds at times and other times they just drop. They can be a little cracked out in terms of just seeing you and doming you instantly. Their pathing seems pretty basic although I have seem the occasional AI in buildings, most are outside. They go into a phase of looking for you where they start yelling at you and insulting you to make you come out and engage them. Its comical at times, but the other issue is their is something weird going on with the audio where you will hear them in one direction but they are really in another.

That leads me to Sound. Audio design is OK. Thats it for now. Its very basic and many times we were not able to tell where a gun was shooting from distance wise, because all gunshots seem to have the same volume, no matter how close or far away you are, until you are far enough away for the sound to drop a certain level. We found this weird phenomenon with buildings where if you got into the right corner, your sound dropped by like 40% instantly. So they definitely have some audio issues to work on.

Graphics and performance wise, I was able to get decent performance (100+ FPS average) with FSR and Performance with most low and medium settings. I'm also on an i9 12900k, 3080 10GB, and 64 GB memorry.

Overall, I would say the game has excellent bones to start from in Early Access and if you want to support its development and see the future vision for this game, I say give it a go and pick it up, but if you are on the fence due to time constraints, too many issues, performance problems, etc then hold off and wait a bit for more polish and improvements.

More issues than the originals. Not what you expect from a definitive collection. Poor management of the servers at launch (which have been "fixed') but I think the damage is done. I was disappointed to say the least. Was hoping for a nostalgic journey back through the stars and got a buggy mess of a game.

Update: Just recorded a session where I spawned, tried to find an MRAP for 30 minutes, found it, got stuck in menus, and had to Alt F4. 10/10 would be scammed again.

Past review:
This game needed more time to marinate.

Now that this game is in the wild, they will be getting all the attention in the world, bad or good.

First, I would remove suppression effects on the soldier animation wise, from the game and based on videos I have seen, this is a major gameplay breaking function right now when this animation gets stuck. Go from there.

Fix the animation getting stuck in your sandbox environment and then add it back later. For now, its not essential for players to experience your game. Look at projects like Squad that added the effects way later on after they had fleshed out their most basic gameplay functionality first.

Fix gamebreaking issues so players can play this game. The weapon menu in this game is not good, I recommend finding someone who understands functional and visually appealing UX design, because the current iteration is not it.

Actually develop good training pages for the player to explain the game and how to play. Add context menus and help spots for the player on the map to explain what is happening in the area they are in at the time.

Having a community for your game is good and I get wanting to have people develop that over a game discord like so many other indie studios are doing recently, but, basic game knowledge should not be walled behind a discord.

Overall I do not recommend purchasing this game in Early Access with its current iteration unless you are willing to be a one way tester, in that you will play and test the game in its current iteration and have to keep coming back as they hopefully improve things.

Game project appears to be dead. No updates since Jan 2023. I would not recommend buying this.

Don't get sucked in, don't put in the effort like I did with mouse and keyboard to get good at shooters and then have that ruined by the fact that none of the players using controller need to do much except aim and shoot. I'm used controller and the rotational aim assist is just out of hand with this game.

I've experienced game breaking bugs that I had to wait for patches to fix in order to continue playing ranked.

The UI and user experience, aside from the setting menus, is terrible, they hired Hulu creative director for the UX and it shows. Go back to classic menus. What happened to a clean simple menu?

The attachment menu is INSANE! Any other game with this many attachments and this type of menu would look like a bad indie shooter UI. What ever happened to having lists?

Ranked is all I played after maxing out camos and trying out all the modes. I will say that the Zombie experience was fun/ Multiplayer is a cesspool of SBMM matchmaking, Ranked is a sweatpool as soon as you hit Diamond lobbies.

I'm convinced half of my games, I have hackers in them, but they could just be insane controller players with crazy good game sense because there is no way to tell unless they miss shows and they rarely do.

I honestly don't know why I keep getting these games, it could be the flashy leveling and progression. it could be I still have a curiosity of how good I can be at a shooter, for what reason I don't know. I enjoyed it, would be the easy answer.

Maybe its my age, maybe I just fell behind and didn't realize when the "superior" mouse and keyboard got passed up and replaced by what can be explained as 'robots fighting other robots' the aim for controller players is auto corrected and tracking can be abused so much in this game.

There has to be a balancing act to increase the skill ceiling for this game, so that there is more fairness when aiming with either peripheral device. Aim assist needs tuned and I'm hoping that Microsoft encourages this to Treyarch for the next Call of Duty.

There should be some margin of error when aiming and for controller players there is a much smaller margin for error than there is for mouse and keyboard players.

It is no wonder why so many people cheat in this game. Because its difficult to tell the difference at a certain point.

I can't wait until there is a breakthrough in anti-cheat and all of these closet cheaters get banned by an AI that can tell the difference between raw player skill and assisted play.

I've been playing this series since the first one that came out during the 90s and it feels like this game has sort of lost its 'soul' if you believe in such things. Cheaters like that were few and far between. Now they are everywhere, its nuts.

I don't know what else to say, this game used to feel like everyone was on the same playing field and now it just feels like nobody misses shots anymore, once they are in your vicinity, 'oh, rotational aim assist', pulls to center of body and then they get no recoil because of some sort of scripts.

Lets just use everything in our power to make the game easier...I don't get how these people have fun when they know full and well the computer is essentially aiming for them.

I can't compete anymore, I give up. Mouse and keyboard is dead for Call of Duty. You did it Activision/Microsoft, you f***ing did it. I will be learning how to play the game on SCUF controller the next time I play so I too can effortlessly aim and shoot at people.

This game is booty, maybe wait for Black Ops 6 if you were thinking about getting it.

Classic CS experience. Can't wait for CS2

Updated review: Much more stable experience with mod support. Worth checking out while the community is supporting it with their modded servers.

----------OLD REVIEW------------
As others are saying, this is NOT worth the $30 unless you wish to support BI with Arma 4's development by purchasing this. The multiplayer connect to servers was very spotty and was ultimately what made me refund this for the time being.

I didn't see much AI combat, it doesn't look like you can coop vs AI except from maybe the Game Master mode but I didn't try that.

I will say the engine they are running on feels much cleaner and smoother. Infantry have JUMP out the gate?! Instead of giving you the scroll menu of Socrates when you approach objects that you can interact with, you get a slimmed down menu giving you easy options for what you would want to do with that object. The engine has 'UGE potential and I can't want to see what they do with it in Arma 4.

That said, if you are an Arma geek looking for a fun coop/PVP experience....this is not that. It was nice to preview what they have but for $30 I expected a little bit more of a polished experience trying to join servers at the very least.

Multiple bugs ran into out the gate:
- Failed to join server after installing mod
- Servers not loading randomly, restarting the game seemed to fix this.
- Unable to join any servers, "Server connection disconnected"
- Servers crashing constantly (see Unable to join any servers)
- Control scheme doesn't allow you to set "Hold" modifiers or "Double tap" control modifiers, so if you want to remap a button they are using by default, you can't due to that limitation.

So I've played 10 hours of this. I can honestly say, this is a fun game for anyone that likes a casual BR experience with solid visuals. The sugar on top is that its set in The Masquerade universe. This gives it a unique feeling over a lot of other BRs.

When I told a friend about this game, I called it the "Adult FortNite without building". The looting is very similar to Fortnite down to the different rarity's of items.

This game takes elements from a number of other games though, and some of these go way back in the past. These are all of the games I could think of.
- Gunz Online (movement and gunfu)
- The Specialists mod for Half Life 1 (movement and gunfu)
- Fortnite (third person, rarity loot, floating loot, customization and emoting, movement, verticality)
- PUBG (third person, modern weapons)
- Ring of Elysium (third person, abnormal circle closing, spawn picking)
- Hyperscape (movement, verticality)

Now the bad.

The single most worst thing you can do for a Battle Royale is not test your party system and make sure its working or at least have a gameplan for when it isn't working for players (i.e. port forwarding steps, workarounds, or a "hey this is known" sort of thing). I cannot for the life of me, connect with my friends unless they can see me and invite me. The integration with Steam is horrible in terms of joining other players. If you have a firewall or any sort of security on your router/modem, you likely will run into the same issue.

I've seen some pretty poor latency in this game as well and it reflects on the players who will be janking around and rubber banding. These are problems we see in other games as well but still worth noting it happens here still....

There are some Archetypes where their abilities seem much more useful than some others. I feel there is some balancing needed for some of them. Take the Prowler for example, which can completely zone an area for a very long time without their ability disappearing. No other archetype has that.

Finally, the way it loads you into each game is a little jarring with how many loading screens there are. Many players I've spoken to really don't like the flow of the loading screens. I think it would make more sense and choose your archetype first, then where you spawn. The most time seems to be spent on the "Waiting for Players" final load.

Hope this helps you at least try out the game before you crucify it because I think its a pretty fun experience so far, even with the party issues I'm having.

When its 7 am and you are going "Why don't I have more coal!?" instead of "Why am I not in bed?" you know its a good game! :D Got the game through Humble Bundle subscription. Thanks Humble Bundle!

I have amended my previous review of the game as the game is about to change in a way for the worse in my opinion and this is me protesting. Please do not buy this game, get Battlebit Remastered or even Battlefield 2042 instead.

If you do decide to get this, please realize that this game is now headed up by a Chinese backed mobile app CEO. The first additions of content they decided to add were emotes, Chinese Navy forces and Russian Airborne forces.

The upcoming infantry overhaul is going to turn you from a trained soldier into a cross between Michael J Fox and Ray Charles with how well you can aim and shoot...

I do not recommend getting this game and I have over 3500 hours in it....mic drop