Recent reviews by Stalast

KovaaK's aim trainer is like a premium gym. There's a huge variety of high quality equipment and machines to use, but if you don't know what or how to train, you will make no progress and waste your time. If you want to make progress, you should follow a training routine. I utilise something called Voltaic Fundamental routines and Voltaic benchmarks (see /r/voltaic on reddit).

Instead of wasting £100 on a new gaming mouse, buy KovaaK's and actually get good at aiming. I use a Logitech G203 (£15 on sale) and will most likely ♥♥♥♥ on 95%+ of the people reading this review in a raw aim duel, judging by my typical training scenario percentile scores.

================== PROS ==================

- The game has it's own economy of weapon skins. It has gambling features such as weapon case opening (just google it). This can be cool depending on whether or not you care about game cosmetics or owning expensive rare items.

- Complex competitive matchmaking ranking system which does quite a good job at representing players' true skill. I don't think any other FPS game has a ranking system as complex as CS:GO but don't quote me on that.

- Easy to play with friends. You can set up a lobby and invite your friends and get a game going in less than minutes.

================== CONS ==================

- The game has lately been heavily catered towards casual players by introducing an EXP-based ranking system which just represents how much time you've spent playing and/or how much money you've spent purchasing in-game missions which reward you with EXP.

- Valve prioritize cosmetic additions over fixing game breaking bugs. There are bugs still in this game that have existed since the game's release such as major hit-registration and hitbox related bugs.

- Game performance is on par, however this should be expected since the graphics are intentionally very static (no destructible environments or fancy explosion effects). Performance could be improved with a newer, less bloated game engine.

- Not very many competitively viable maps to play on. It would be better to see high quality map pools that rotate each season in matchmaking.

- Terrible matchmaking server performance. Valve's dedicated servers used for matchmaking are truly dreadful. The fact that we have to use 3rd party services such as ESEA or Faceit to play on fast and responsive servers is shocking.

================ CONCLUSION ===============

Overall, this game doesn't really satisfy what I originally liked Counter Strike for. It used to be known as the single best military-style competitive team-based FPS experience but it seems like Valve isn't prioritising their efforts on crucial competitive aspects such as weapon balancing, gameplay mechanics, or bug fixes. For the past 2 years, the majority of the updates have been used to attract more players rather than making the game more competitively viable which is why I no longer support or play this game.

id Software unfortunately made all the wrong decisions and killed off most of the competitive community in an attempt to make the game more noob-friendly.

If you're wondering about game framerate and performance, here's my FPS on lowest possible settings 720p with a HD Radeon 7950 (same as R9 280) http://i.imgur.com/mdKCyVl.png and here is 1080p with all settings maxed out apart from r_dynamic_lights http://i.imgur.com/b07vO7q.png

[Review as of 25/02/2015] This game is in its infancy, but it has already proven that it is to be taken seriously as we have had a major update; the netcode is now better than anything I've ever experienced in First Person Shooters, with perfect hitboxes too. The entire game engine is built from scratch just for this game and as a result, it runs BUTTER SMOOTH.

The first ever EU tournament for reflex was hosted on 12/02/2015 and it proved how well the game works for competitive play, there were no real gameplay issues during the tournament and there were 5 maps in the pool (all of which are new and surprisingly really well made). Everyone had a blast and we got to witness top players such as HAL9000 and rokky wreak havoc in 1v1 matches, when you watch them play you will realise just how high the skill ceiling of the game is.

The development roadmap promises to bring an overhaul to the game's UI, full matchmaking support, training and tutorials, steam workshop integration, art integration for maps, more gametypes and more features for the already amazing map editor.

I'm genuinely excited for the future of this game and I already love the game even in this early stage. Buy it and support the devs, they are truly working their butts off!