Recent reviews by RadicalEdward2

As much as I appreciate the ability to play a WW2 shooter after an almost 7 year gap since the last major WW2 game, Heroes and Generals, in it’s current state does not deserve the reward, sadly.

While I do praise their level ambition to create a game with it’s own engine from the ground up, the game is still far from “Game of the Year” or “Steam Award” material.

While the RETO team is starting to make more attempts to connect with it’s community, I do feel the attempt to relate with their demographic and fanbase through “Meet the devs” posts has come far too late during the game’s development lifespan.

Over the years, once adamant members of the HnG community have turned their backs on the game for the lack of communication and the devs’ habit of putting forth major updates while failing to listen when the majority of the community decried the changes as game-breaking.

The most recent example would be the implementation of an entirely new spawn system (BUNDLED WITH THE GAME’S OFFICIAL LAUNCH).

And the update that followed (post-launch) included re-introducing previously removed Health Crates by haphazardly placing them either a marathon-and-a-half away from the battlefield OR out in the open where no one in their right mind would even use them.

While the BETA was intended to serve as a period in which the player community and the developers actively communicated back and forth on a regular basis, the official launch of the game overhauled a good portion of the game’s maps that were being built upon since the beginning of BETA to the point that any critique provided by the BETA testers went to waste as the maps were entirely different from their states prior to launch; so much so that the BETA versions of some maps could count as their own independent maps.

All of these new issues coupled with long-time existing ones like lack of map variety, optimization issues, lack of communication outside of streams, censorship of all forms of propaganda/imagery (fictionalized assets or authentic), and habitual weapon nerfing, the game was in no way, shape, or form to grant an official launch (yet).

Having been part of this community for almost a year and having reviewed games professionally in the past, I’ve never seen a game that managed to take one step forward but, two steps back with every new update.

Bold decisions like changing the spawn systems (which still is being decried by the entire community due to it’s lack of alternate spawn locations to counter compromised spawn points and the removal of spawn on “uncontested” capture points like in the BETA) should have been kept in BETA; not released alongside the launch.

Rather than exiting the BETA after a 3 year “testing period”, the game should have relabeled itself as an “Early Access” title since members of the team have even mentioned in the launch devstream that they have plans on adding more features like faction alliances, more sub-factions, battleships, vehicles, weapons, and new maps.

That list of to-be-explored concepts is daunting enough to prove the game was not ready for a full fledged launch yet.

With these thoughts in mind, I don’t believe RETO-MOTO is fully deserving of the harsh stigma it’s been receiving from it’s community (not fully but, partially deserving of it).

Heroes and Generals is their first big project and it’s continuing to grow with each update (there’s still flaws with the updates that quickly overshadow the improvements but, hopefully that will occur less in the future).

If I WAS to nominate Heroes and Generals for a Steam Award, I would hope that they would at least the RETO-MOTO team would make a far greater effort to communicate with it’s community during the continued development of the game (both the newcomers and the abuse-hardened veterans) to help distance themselves from the “all-about-the-money”/”nerf at the drop of a hat” image it has been given by it’s community.

I will continue to support RETO-MOTO and play their game but, I hope this somewhat long-winded review did not fall onto deaf ears.