Recent reviews by Sir BBQ

best game evah

Solid game, very late to the party but still enjoyed it. Some puzzles were cryptic af though.

Love the world building, puzzles and humor.

This game is unplayable. What do I mean by this? Games are supposed to be fun. This game is anti-fun. It resembles Smite 1 in appearance, but lacks all the soul and character of its predecessor. If I were to review this game, and only the game, and completely ignore all of the negatives of Hi-Rez management, then maybe I can actually fit my review into something more concise.

Smite, in theory, on paper... is a fun idea. Smite, the game, is not fun. There are days where I will be watching video gameplay from my favorite streamers on YouTube, get hyped and feel like playing. Then I log on, play a few matches, and remember why I quit this game over and over and over. Why do I come back? Apparently because I like torturing myself, but if you're not into that, then you should probably avoid this game.

What is holding this game back? Aside from the fact that iT's aN aLpHa, Hi-Rez has miserably failed to establish any sort of culture or vision for its flagship game. This has happened over the years, since Smite 1, through a failure of addressing toxicity. Currently, every game to every other game is filled with griefers or sh1tters. Sh1tters are the people who just plain suck and don't have the gamer mentality to effectively play a MOBA. Maybe they're new, okay, whatever, I still don't want to play with them. The matchmaking is horrendous. The games are practically rigged by putting the noobs on your team which is an instant loss unless you can pull a hyper-carry, but even top streamers are feeling the pain of the matchmaking and general lack of skill and awareness of the playerbase. Then there are the griefers, who are pretty much present in every game and will babyrage, go afk, afk farm, and VGS spam all game long with the goal of being toxic and making the experience as miserable as possible. That's what this game is. It is a game that people play solely to make others feel miserable for 30-40 min at a time. What you see advertised is not what you get. Literally, every game to every other game has someone throwing a tantrum, which ruins any integrity a match might have and leads to absolute misery. If you don't believe me, again, just refer to the top streamers who also echo this same sentiment.

Hi-Rez has failed to ban griefers. Hi-Rez has failed to teach its playerbase how to play and behave. By opening up this game to the more casual crowd, they have invited a mismatch between experienced MOBA players and people who are just picking up a game controller for the first time in their lives. This contributes to the toxicity. Unfortunately, it falls on Hi-Rez to establish their vision and loosely expected ways to play the game (i.e. sharing farm/not screwing over your team by hogging it all up, map awareness, lane awareness, knowing how and when to rotate, even simply LISTENING to calls made by the team). Way too many players have this mindset of "I'm going to play this game how I want to play it", not realizing that such a mindset is incredibly selfish and is basically trolling your team because this is a team-based game. Even the most garbage players who have comms or know how to group up will outperform "better" players who don't know how or refuse to group up.

All in all, if you're deadset on seeing this hell for yourself, I'd recommend NOT paying Hi-Rez $30 to torture yourself and wait until Free-to-Play release. However, given Hi-Rez's incompetence over the past 11-12 years with Smite 1, it doesn't seem like they've learned their lesson at all and so I do not have much hope for this game. Will there still be people playing? Probably... but I guarantee you it won't be a fun experience.

Update #3: The playerbase still makes this game unplayable. If you go into a casual match, you will see actual potato gameplay. If you queue into ranked, some of those potatoes will also be there because WHY ISN'T THERE A BARRIER TO ENTERING RANKED!? Potatoes. Potatoes everywhere. Even in casual matches where there isn't SR at stake, the potatoes on your team will just feed and then keep you hostage by spamming F7 despite the score being something like 5-30. I've found myself just Alt+F4ing and calling it a day much more often, which is not something I've usually done in the past. I'm just over this game. I only log on for the free gems in hopes that this game will have better players in a few years. Even when this game enters F2P, it's still going to be the same mess. I will likely wait a few years until these filthy casuals go onto play different games and hope that the actual gamers who stay are the more competent Smite players.


Update #4 (Beta F2P Release): Lots of improvements to the game itself and plays more fluid. Changes to the map/jungle are appreciated. Lots of farm on the map and lots of items to be picked up from mobs. They even started giving more free gems, likely to offset the badwill they created with how they presented the legacy gem stuff. The game itself is "almost" there to where I would recommend it. However, I still cannot because... Hi-Rez sucks bootyhole. I don't understand why they hate success. I truly cannot wrap my head around the dumb, idiotic managerial decisions they make. Upon F2P release, there's obviously going to be an influx of new players. Cool, always happy to see the playerbase increase. Doesn't mean I want them on my team in a Ranked match. Smooth brain Hi-Rez thought it would be a good idea to have practically no prerequisites to enter ranked, so someone who literally just installed the game and who hasn't played Smite 1 can pretty much instantly queue into a Ranked Match where they obviously end up feeding the enemy team while contributing nothing to their own team, ergo destroying any integrity a match may have had and guaranteeing a loss 99.99% of the time. It is largely known in the community that matchmaking is the biggest problem facing Smite 2 right now, and whoever is in charge of this system at Hi-Rez has failed miserably and needs to be replaced with someone who knows what they're doing. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what improvements they make to the core game if the player experience itself is a wretched, botched experience that wastes your time. To make matters worse, if you even try to complain about these issues in their Discord or r/Smite subreddit, the mods will stifle your speech in an effort to bury any perceived negative press about the game's issues. Truly a sad experience.

Update #5: They keep making improvements to the core game; however, this game will forever be unplayable due to the god awful playerbase. If it's not intentional, malicious trolls who ruin everyones' experience, then it's actual potatoes every match, back to back. Casual, ranked, it doesn't matter. Every game mode is unplayable. Hi-Rez may have forfeited too much good will and it is now too little to late. This game won't survive at this rate. A year later and they still can't get the matchmaking to work properly. Diamond tier matches and pairing me with a 2000 gold player who goes 1-16? What a joke.

Update #6: Core game continues to improve, matchmaking continues to get worse. what's new.

Do I think this game is worth $70? Lma0, nope.


Should you buy this game?

Only if you've been itching to play a CoD game and haven't played in a while. I stopped playing COD after Black Ops 2. Bit the bullet on this rip-off of a game and, well... it's CoD. It's everything I expected. Although I used to enjoy the campaigns, I since became a sweaty multiplayer instead so that is what I care about. Frankly, I can't hate it too much. There's hella bugs that they should eternally be reminded and ashamed of, but it's CoD. It scratched the itch. If you bought 2019 and MW2, I wouldn't blame you for skipping this. I would have too.

Update: Now that the itch has been scratched, I can think clearly now and realize this game does not live up to the original experience. In addition, Activision and their greed knows no end and has ruined the game with EOMM. This is my last COD purchase ever.

Gacha game exploiting nostalgia for what used to be a fun game. P2W, toxic economy, toxic playerbase. Game gets progressively more broken and buggy. This is just a cashcow meant to milk moniez for nostalgia.

A shell of what Halo used to be, and with worse matchmaking experience. I'd rather be playing Halo 3 right now but I also don't feel like dropping money on the same game just to play matchmaking. Halo Infinite is free and you get what you pay for.

Honestly, I like the game. I enjoyed the board game and figured I'd give this online version a shot. Low and behold, my first few games went splendid. Then I started running into people either disconnecting or leaving games. This is especially painful when I invest anywhere from 30 min - 1hr and then it all goes to waste. I see that they have a karma system, but it doesn't seem like it's a functional system. Either they start you off at 50/100 karma or something is glitched. There's no reason a newish player should be paired with karma that is already considered low. In addition, there is basically no penalty for being toxic and ditching games. Losing -5 karma points means essentially nothing. Toxic players will continue to abuse this system and leave once they feel like things aren't going their way. I understand disconnecting because of connection issues, but it is obvious when players rage quit. There needs to be stiffer penalties and a way to report players. Toxic players will kill your game. This is true for any game, and unless the developers care to implement something to quash toxicity, I recommend avoiding buying this game if you're mostly interested in random matchmaking. If you're going to play with friends, sure, whatever, buy it. On a side note, there should be a better method of managing cards in hand like viewing the cards in a separate window and being able to sort via different categories. When I draw too many cards, it can be difficult to sift through.

Hella late to the game but highly recommend. Haven't tried GTA online.

The game has potential to be fun, BUT... it is ultimately and infinitely ruined by Hi-Rez's incompetence and toxic playerbase. Unfortunately, a lot of the toxicity comes from the top and Hi-Rez's failure to actually do anything relevant to improve the player experience. They don't do anything about trolls who waste other people's time in ranked. Casual matches are just as pointless and toxic. You can play your damn best every game and be top player in ranked, but there is still very little chance you will rank up because you will be paired with absolute scrubs or trolls who will just feed or not play as a team, then you will reach "ELO Hell" which means you will likely never rank up because of the conditions you are given. People going ADC vs a Bellona in Solo lane, people not playing Support as assigned, people just doing anything they can to ruin the experience for others. Bots holding down 'W' key and feeding the opponent 0-15. Scrubs wanting to be Leeroy Jenkins and refusing to play as a team or listen to calls. People rage quitting or Smite's garbage servers crashing and disconnecting people. Good luck with that 4 v 5. Sometimes, even your own team mates will refuse to surrender a lost game to keep you hostage out of spite, and if you leave, you get punished. And Hi-Rez? They can't be bothered to actually clean up these problems. They only care about pumping out skins for your hard earned moniez. Zero quality of life improvements for the game. Avoid this game like the plague. Save your time and save yourself the frustration. To any new players considering picking up this game for the first time, I promise you... you will enjoy this game at the start for like a week tops, then all the glaring problems will begin to show up and you will start sounding like me. Also, the community isn't friendly to new players, but as I've come to learn, many of these angry trolls were once innocent new players who turned ugly after being exposed to Smite for an extended period of time. Smite's ship sailed long ago; this is a dying game with too many problems to fix that won't be fixed any time soon

Update: Tried this game again after my friend wanted me to play with him. Nothing has changed. Get paired up with people who throw the match at character select screen and then proceed to feed. Griefers left and right intentionally throwing games because they died once. People abandoning matches when it's obvious they rage quit and not due to Smite's garbage servers. You can legit send in screenshots of people admitting to throwing with included vulgar harassment and Hi-Rez still does nothing. Do NOT play this game. Encouraged my friend to play literally anything else (that is also not managed by Hi-Rez). Hi-Rez can't be bothered to clean up the behavior of their playerbase. Toxic af and endorsed by Hi-Rez's ineptitude. I am serious, do NOT play this game, do NOT support Hi-Rez. Uninstalled and never turning back.