Recent reviews by Soviet_Ponys

The first map of this season is a breath of fresh air. The ice is fun to drive over, the map is difficult and has some really difficult spots but is fair because of the contracts. The map encourages to use scouts and good play.

The second map... Imandra... The only way you're keeping your mental health intact is with alcohol. The map is intentionally designed to waste hours of your time and ♥♥♥♥ you over in every way possible. The devs that made this map and the first clearly are different and whoever made Imandra should go to hell. Rocks bigger than your wheels litter the map, every road has horrible amounts of crap to block your path, perfectly placed trees to block you, concrete blocks to ♥♥♥♥ you, telephone poles under the snow to rip your truck apart. Mut pits everywhere the eyes can see with deep snow everywhere else. Not a single road on this map is actually ok to drive on. There are no good paths. Even some of the less painful routes are set at a 45 degree angle with no winch points to save you. You have multiple spots that put you in mud deeper than some of the biggest trucks' wheels while putting bolders bigger than those wheels so you can't get over them, with no winch spots. Ice... everywhere, trying to make you use horrible chain tires on this hell that struggle with mud. The two maps is day and night different. One map is perfectly made to be challenging but fair, fun with ice (even if I hate all the rocks on it), and makes you love the map. The other map makes you want to drink yourself to death as you sit in a mud pit for hours wiggling back and forth because your closest truck is an hour away. The map has multiple bridges... THAT CAN'T BE REPAIRED. Thanks alot you useless ♥♥♥♥♥.

Go get the upgrade parts, trucks, do the first map if you want something challenging and fun and LEAVE. Imandra truly holds the title as one of the worst maps in the game. Amur is worse but this map follows right behind it.

Imandra could have only been made by someone who is straight up a psychopath and has ruined my experience for this game.

Straight up doesn't work on an HDD. Games really are going downhill in laziness. If it wasn't that I got this game from a friend for free I'd already have refunded it for that reason alone.

Clunky, lack of content, and inability of strategy makes this game a complete joke. The AI has severe cheats for their ranging and aiming that will prevent any new content from being worthwhile. Their first shot is nearly guaranteed to be pinpoint and makes most missions pure pain just out of the sake of ♥♥♥♥♥♥ AI. Some missions like "Crossroads Screen" are straight up impossible without cheesing the AI from a range past what they can react to. They don't react to being shot at when past a certain distance, showing just how bad their AI actually is. The devs are also complete jackasses in their discussion, so have fun putting out any complaints since they can't take criticism and see themselves as professionals in how modern tactics work. This game isn't even close to what it's worth and I'd still call it a rip off at 50% off.

A very refreshing and well built tower defense game. Easily worth picking up and you'd be doing a disservice not to give this game a try. Honestly I haven't played a tower defense game this good and I think the only thing bad I can really say about it is it raised the bar for tower defense games and it's going to make others feel so lackluster after playing a few hours. I hope to see this game get an endless more and some more levels, the build diversity and randomization feels great and building your own funnel wherever (mostly) you please it's a great change from any other game.

Please just do yourself a favor and pick it up, for the price this game goes well above and beyond other games.

Alright, lets do a tower defense game, but make walls and towers cost absurd amounts, then... we're going to make the turrets and towers complete and utter ♥♥♥♥. The only way to actually beat waves is using the crossbow unit which also costs an absurd amount, meaning if you aren't sweating the entire game away to min max the game, you're probably going to loose. This game is just unfair, sweaty, unrelaxing, and up there as one of the worst in "tower defense." Would never recommend this crap, considering the devs seem to be baiting the idea of co-op for years and use it as a headline to push updates when the co-op update isn't coming any time soon, but they'll be sure to put it to try and up player counts.

You've got a major balance problem when the enemy that is suppose to be the "tank" (The crusher) also is the siege destroyer and pretty much completely outmatches every other enemy in terms of health, armor, damage, and ability to completely ruin your game and the only thing that counters it are crossbow units. A singular unit you have to rely upon because your tower defense game can't use towers effectively. They have zero counter, even their counter unit still sucks against them.

Seems this dev team has the same concept that helldivers has with their balance team, nerfing everything into the ground for the sake of difficulty, but difficulty totally equals fun. If you're curious for the survival mode only 1% of the community has actually beat on NORMAL difficultly, meaning surviving the final stand which is near impossible with the sheer amount of nerfs. The final wave of the survival mode buffs all enemies, including giving crushers double the health of your max tier wall... fun. Have fun surviving the game from 4 different directions when you're expected to go from zero to hundred in difficulty. Oh yeah, also random modifiers, one of the negatives gives enemies a massive damage bonus against your structures, so have fun trying to defend a tower defense game where you're expected to no use walls or towers and get ♥♥♥♥♥♥ over by RNG. Maps are RNG as well, so you can get ♥♥♥♥♥♥ over by chokepoints and resources.

I'd actually like to see the devs beat their game on the difficulties above normal... because honestly without sweating and microing for hours upon hours, save scumming, and having good map RNG, I think the survival mode is actually impossible to beat.

Also no endless mode if you're curious, though knowing the dev team they'd make it impossible.

1.0 Update: Came back for the multiplayer hoping that having a friend alongside would be enjoyable, but honestly it was pure disappointment. Unlike the singleplayer, the multiplayer mode only has 4 waves. That's it. It's about 1 1/2 hours for a match and it's over. You barely even get to make a few dozen units before it's over. Upgrades seem pointless when the match just ends. Pretty disappointing and wouldn't recommend until they let you edit how long the session goes.

Forcing stealth missions in an engine that can't handle stealth, good job. Stealth missions are an absolute joke. The game forces using it's horrible inventory system and is just a massive downgrade with few improvements compared to men of war. I'd only get it massively on sale and it's still just bad.

♥♥♥♥ this map. This is a map is only for people that want to suffer. I want to see the devs complete this absolute nightmare of a map. Every road has ice, every road has ditches with deep soft mud to completely stop you with few winch points, if any. Every road has a tree or telephone pole that completely breaks your truck after tapping it. Every road is perfectly designed to make your life a living hell. This map was designed for only the most broken trucks and even those struggle. Missions are atrocious and ensure you quit the game after playing this dlc. ♥♥♥♥ this forsaken piece of utter ♥♥♥♥. If you got this map free it would still not be worth it, you'd still be ripped off.

What is worse than COH2?
-Challenges. You have dailies, weeklies, and event challenges which reward a currency (Merit) to buy skins and commanders. The skins and commanders are overpriced so you'll be lucky to get a single skin a week if you go out of your way to complete every single one of them. In COH2 you must play only a few matches, while in this game you must play a least a dozen to complete them, including campaign missions or multiplayer only for some of the challenges. You do no earn merit through playing through matches. Oh, guess I should mention the big part about this crap. Challenges can't be done with mods, tuning packs, or modded maps. No wonder this game did horribly.
-The game feels like a mobile game. Graphics, movement, AI, even the UI and main menu just feel tuned down to look like a mobile game.
-The AI just straight up blatantly cheats, even the standard. The AI clearly gets more resources than you and seems to have way better hit chance, veterancy, no fog of war, can see camoed units, and your friendly AI seems to be toned down to give a fair chance of the AI trying to kill you. The AI has no improvements from the previous games and honestly feels worse. I've had AI straight up walk through multiple machine guns without being suppressed, go ahead and do that in any previous title. The AI just straight up cheats and has far more advantages than you. They aren't good but just plain annoying.
-Balancing. It feels like this game was just tuned for Esports, and if you look it up from beta, yes it was. Guess that's what's more important for the dev team, balancing units like a competitive game rather than anything fun. On top of that, nearly everything is gutted from the previous games and it feels like you have half your units missing. Have fun spamming the same 2-3 units every match for every faction.
-Only 3-4 commanders per faction and honestly they bleed together making nothing feel unique. Some commanders of course are locked behind the challenge currency so have fun grinding that for a small gameplay change.
-Getting kicked to the main menu after a match. Is it really that hard to put you back in the skirmish lobby? A small nitpick but seriously, does no dev actually play the game to fix these small issues?

What does it do better?
-Auto reinforce mechanic.
-Auto vaulting
-Towing mechanic
-Improve cover mechanic though not by much
-Some upgrades feel better I guess

Honestly the big breaker for this game is having progression tied to playing the game vanilla. Good way to just ♥♥♥♥ off your community. I bought the game 60% off and I still feel completely ripped off. Game felt bad during the beta and still feels bad.

Don't know why this game is getting so much praise. it looks cool at first but then really shows it's flaws mid to late game. Farms can't keep up with food demands which is pretty much the only source of food late game. AI is honestly one of the worst I've seen in any kind of city builder, farmers leaving stock out to decay from rain, over filling storage so it decays as well. AI won't listen to you putting restrictions on storage, or even restrictions for max amount of an item even existing at all right now, so if you have a single blacksmith they'll end up overproducing to flood the market and make your storage filled with nothing but trash. Communal bakers can't keep up with bread production so you either need half your town as bakers, or get the proper baker from the tech tree. Oh... did you not pick that up when you realized and are now capped out on your tech because you decided to make one large town instead of two? Well go ♥♥♥♥ yourself. Bakers are locked behind tech and it doesn't become apparent how important they are until you realize it and use up all your tech. You can expand your territory but to do so you have to fight the baron which has armies double your size and spawn in your territory. The baron will eventually challenge you to take your city but the game is unforgiving and you just have to save scum your way through because of how poor design the claim system is. This game is bad, filled with bad ai, bugs, and not worth anywhere near $40.

And don't give me the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, oh but it's early access. This game is $40 and it's no where near worth it right now. Maybe in a year but right now it's not worth ♥♥♥♥. The game is a challenge, but not because it's hard, but because of the horrible mechanics, fighting system, ai, bugs, and everything else.

This game is mindlessly tedious in everything and it does nothing well. It's a wonder how this game even has as many positive reviews as it does. Combat is a washed version of mount and blade but just straight up sucks and your combat skills take hundreds of hours to gain just so you can fight a basic bandit... You die in 1-2 swings from a club and enemies lack any stam so they just endlessly block while having health bars as if they were eating the finest food the world has to offer. The food system is similar to valheim except food spoils in mere minutes, not even a full day in game, meaning you will be running on the worst food far into the game and lacking any health to actually take a hit. Armor is pointless, weapons feel just... off. The inventory system is clearly designed to be grindy and rely upon the AI building system which just flat out is badly designed, with AI walking everywhere, getting stuck, and hardly being worth it. I've played a fair share of grindy games but this one takes the cake. I spent hours feeling like I accomplished nothing... I'd say wait a year but this game just has bad foundations and there is a high likelihood that the devs don't play their own game.

I should also mention this abandoned their last major title Last Oasis to move onto Bellwright and legit said it was either shut it or move on to a new title, meaning their company has been going downhill. I'm sure in a year this game will be abandoned and shoved under the rug. I have to question the sheer bootlicking from the game's community that it's either bots or the paid positive reviews, because this game does NOTHING good.

And no, don't say it's because this genre isn't my style, I played and restarted several times through Medieval Dynasty. I thought that game was grindy as well but it actually did some things fairly good, this one does not.