Recent reviews by spandexgoblin

Lovely game, encountered a few bugs recently either with the most recent update causing issues or whatnot but generally a good game to wind down for the night with and not feel stressed

also the account setup is directly skippable and doesn't do anything, very appreciative

epic ruined it, monetized for every last cent with no bug fixes for common issues, love the weekly end user license agreements that dont work and make you relaunch

Honest review after falling in love with this game only to be continuously abused by Nexon, who is very quickly becoming the new money grabber after Activision and EA have been in the spotlight. This is a copenseethen rant main dish but I feel it's founded on genuine criticism on issues that have no right to be in a "1.0" release live service game:

Gripes;

Matchmaking fairness:

My club and I will consistently get paired against people in Power Shift, the casual game mode for people that have W2s, pay income tax, and own homes or have children, that have eliminations over 50,000 (50,000 people used to live here, now it's a ghost town). I have idk how many hours like 200, 300 and have 3k. I'm no mathspert but even though i suck, that is ridiculous. My friends and I play after work and get a few kills per game, what in your ever omniscient matchmaking system did makes you say "the guys that have negative K/Ds, main support characters, can't snipe for ♥♥♥♥, and land maybe one good Light game every other week should definitely go up against career streamers that are taking Vyvanse washed down with GFuel." Call of Duty, which is now run by what is probably the biggest wash of a development team, is able to do proper matchmaking that at least doesn't feel bypolar (i may eat those words). This will then swing into a lobby where the enemy team is most definitely the default Unreal Engine bots attempting to figure out how vaulting works. XDefiant was able to do matchmaking properly. I seriously don't get matchmaking woes, instead of basing performance on recent games, why is it not based around TOTAL AVERAGE performance? Popping off in a bot lobby doesn't warrant getting thrown into a TTV username meatgrinder where i will be backstabbed by Lights every 35 seconds (or negative second, whichever the respawn timer decides to use) Which brings us to-

Mechanics:

Respawn timers are inconsistent. A team wipe will trigger but allow a single player to respawn and give everyone else a 25 second time out. You will wipe the enemy team only to have a random person on their team respawn or sometimes multiple. You will receive 300 second respawns, rarely, and I have even seen NEGATIVE respawn timers. The respawn timer is an int and shouldn't even be able to be negative. This is the problem I have with Build-A-Game Engines: you get these seemingly random bugs on every update. It is a dangerous trend in the market and is diluting genuinely good developers (embark) into the trap of starting with most of the gritty work done and all they have to do is "think of the game and make it." It's nice having a platform to build on and i HIGHLY doubt these guys were bringing Frostbite with them but the Swiss Army Knife engine is a jack of too many trades and master of none. I'm seeing so many dime a dozen UE games turn into abandoneware after a year of woes. The Finals is definitely much more fleshed out but there is a lofty uphill battle Embark has to push their game up in order to make this something like an esports title or a perpetual live service game. I much still prefer this to battle royale and other shooters but it's getting harder to sit through an update that breaks a few core components of the game and resets matchmaking back to grueling difficulty.

Netplay:

The servers are bad because multiple times per game you will get that little latency and packet loss popup and suffer from a seizure. These servers can not keep up and are dropping or not registering player inputs. You will frequently find yourself wondering why your ability didn't trigger or your gun didn't fire and it is not your imagination. Player inputs have to be synced with the server and the low tick rate (30tps and sometimes 24tps) makes Warzone look snappy. This will not always be the case but half of the time the server will appear fine only for you to get ghosted around cover (guaranteed) or most throwables not following any known laws of physics. Currently, grenades have a tendency to have occluded damage areas due to imaginary terrain geometry. You will find your grenades being useless unless they land inside the shoes of the person you throw them at. You my also find your grenades being extremely privy to killing YOU, the viewer. In power shift i frequently throw grenades onto the platform as i can follow the easy aim curve but can't shoot due to skill issue, and get killed by them exploding on TOP of the platform while i am UNDERNEATH the platform. Walls should have meaning. This 5.6.1 update made grenades a little more consistent but forget about using them to clear areas anymore as they have wonky damage radii and will most likely just kill you instead of the enemy beating you to death with a Famas.

I am seeing most of my casual gaming friends shy away from this game due to the inconsistencies and level gaps after a year of development. It feels unfair most of the time when you get cheated out of a nice play because a Light's sniper can curve around barricades. Many such cases! The competitive fly trap that attracted most career players is now oversaturated so you will frequently find insanely high level gaps in any game mode. When comp first came out a lot of the good players clawed at it and left us alone in power shift, now that's pretty much over and the light/med mains that have perfect aim and wiggle macros plague that game mode and farm kills, making casual objective play moot.

Kyoto:

Hi, have you or a loved one wanted to play on one of the Season 4 or 5 maps in power shift? Unfortunately that is impossible. Here at The Finals, we will allow you to play at wonderful locations like Kyoto, Snow Kyoto, and even wonderful Fog Kyoto. I swear every other game is Kyoto, maybe 2/3 of my games are Kyoto in power shift. The S4 and S5 maps are really good and i can't play them because our friend group is 4 or 5 and we have to play power shift. IT WAS A GOOD MAP but please if i made you eat pancakes every day, 3 meals a day you would want something else eventually! I deleted my excel sheet that tracked our wins and losses at the start of S4, which introduced matchmaking that was worse than this current season's, and tracked which maps we played on Power Shift: it was kyoto most of the time. 70% of games were in Kyoto. I am never visiting Kyoto in real life, on google maps, or in literature ever again i am completely sick of it! The main building collapses and your PC looks up at you and goes "I'm tired boss" before DECIMATING your frames from 100 to 10. This was my only gripe with destruction, that Kyoto building must have 100,000 Trillion polygons or something, my little pc can not handle it. It did get better in 5.6 for sure, however.

Praises;

I will give credit where credit is due, the destruction is pretty damn consistent (KYOTO) and is honestly the one part of the game i don't have trouble with. You can really tell where the developers spent all their time! Gunplay is at least snappy when it works properly but server tick rate and reliability really holds this game back. It's probably due to the destruction physics that they can't go higher but that's my speculation. Skins are good if you're into that, i find myself buying one every season and the battle pass is at least worth your while.

As a player you don't notice what is working, only what is not working. It's one thing to have a mechanic that is kinda buggy but you can work around it, like PUBG not having proper grenade throwing based on mouse pointer location well after it launched, but it is double frustrating to have a feeling that you are getting slighted by inconsistencies in core game mechanics like vaulting, hit registration, button input, and matchmaking. Embark needs to go the R6 route and do a health update and skip content for a season or two and get this polished up. If Nexon doesn't allow that then they can push sand.

Wall of Runes: tldr play but don't expect your blood pressure to drop

edit: can't join certain friends games now, new feature drop

get juggled by level 1 bugs and die to charger that spawned out of a rock on Medium difficulty, for the love of christ, the ragdoll physics are comical, not everyone has zero upper body strength and is unable to get up after falling (help! i've fallen and i am a weak swedish developer!)

bots all have aimbot (ha) and the difficulty doesn't matter because the devs dont know what balance is, challenging is the same as suicide on bots and it hasn't changed since launch. Speaking of balance, why the hell are you nerfing every gun in a PVE game? AGS has earmuffs on with a terrible CM team that is hindering this game, your community is screaming at you and all you release are empty reddit AMAs and twitter posts

bots just arent fun, theres no extra reward for the extra sweat so bugs it is, and that means half the game is inaccessible to a normie player (me), just let us have fun blowing ♥♥♥♥ up and focus less on the PVE balance, Make Helldivers Fun Again.

Abysmal game with absolutely ZERO concept of how a multiplayer game should work. To play multiplayer you have to play:
1) an unskippable intro stage - this is the SIXTH game in the series and 99% of players here have done this before, get over yourselves with this Ubisoft-tier high-and-might "you really gotta learn how to place monkeys" ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥
2) reach level 20 (40-60 minutes of game time) to even BEGIN to play with friends - the only reason ANY of us bought this game was for multiplayer and I have to sit out while my friends play because God forbid I go in right away and start playing with them, better sit out and play the same game I've been playing since I was in 3rd grade.
3) link to a Ninja Kiwi account and use codes to play online - just use the Steam interface you stupid, time-wasting, boomer bot, script-kiddie-tier "game developers" riding off the ♥♥♥♥♥ of the flash wave that brought you to the Steam store. Humble yourselves thinking that players are going to jump through an hour of hoops to play your game. Lil bro just figured out how javascript works and decided to lock everyone behind a bunch of unskippable crap, it's like listening to your wife complain about the same ♥♥♥♥ about work for 10 years and failing the quick time event.

0/10 didn't make it 9 minutes into the game before I lol raged out and asked for a refund. Go ♥♥♥♥ yourselves Ninja Kiwi, I'd rather play Bloons TD 3 on a ♥♥♥♥♥♥ cracked iPhone, back when REAL devs made games that were meant to be actually played instead of mindlessly grinded through like a Bethesda game.

its like if bethesda made a bethesda game but it didnt have the bethesda name behind it so its just a terrible game

Great game with great gameplay except Epic ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sucked the fun out of this with their crossplay bullspit, i have to restart every time i enable or disable it and waste 5 minutes of my precious, depleting life every time i play with someone on epic or steam, its a button flip if the inept COD devs can do it , so can you!

Finally, a real video game:
1) Fun
2) Good music
3) Play with friends easily
4) Lots of things to upgrade and play with
5) no microtransactions
6) Frequent updates for ONE dev
7) When i click "play game" it takes 2 seconds to start PLAYING the game, i don't have to sit through 3 minutes of cut scenes, loading screens, shaders, ads, and logos to even get to the main menu

If a lone dev that makes music for a living can BTFO AAA studios and other legacy studios like Ninja Kiwi then anyone can and I'm glad they are

insta banned on all east asia servers for "cultural appropriation"

10/10

ok im waiting for the storyline