Recent reviews by Ferrix

Fatshark is out here teasing weapons that they then immediately say they aren't adding to the game in a follow-up damage control post.

>"Really old" weapons that don't resemble normal stuff and immediately look like old Mechanicus toys

>The troops that find them were given medication of some sort by Hadron, and now that they're close to these nondescript weapons, they're getting headaches

>All signs point to Radium weaponry

>FS Community Manager rapidly has to do copy-pasted damage control

>It's Just Good Old Plasma Gun That's Already In The Game!

>Literally nobody believes this BS

Meanwhile, Fatshark'll probably drop some new 35-dollar-each cosmetic sets into the cash shop on launch day.

They also just arbitrarily decided to delay the severely-necessary itemization fix until almost the end of the year, when the entire playerbase has been clamoring for the removal of locks from weapons and curios for years now.

Rare, people playing your video game and posting the recordings on Youtube isn't copyright infringement even IF they're evading a ban and violating TOS. Get your act together and stop abusing DMCA report systems. If someone breaks your TOS, ban their IP, don't abuse the law to get your way.

TL;DR/"I ain't readin' allat": Boss design is really fragging rough and unfun in some ways, current state of weapon balance in PvE and PvP has objective-bests that you can feel forced to use sometimes especially in New Game 1, it's pain.

Bosses that can move so fast you cannot keep them on screen, bosses that expect you to fight them with weapons you don't unlock until after you beat them, bosses with forced-damage mechanics that can't be dodged or avoided at the time you encounter them due to lack of equipment, bosses that arbitrarily ignore your lock-on sometimes so you randomly can't hit them, bosses that INTENTIONALLY ignore your lock-on so you can't hit them within certain windows, bosses with directional armor so they can't be harmed at all save in a tiny little area, bosses with almost-perfect input tracking, and one boss in particular that has a Phase 2 opening window where it is completely and totally invulnerable to all damage... but it can attack you for a good 10 seconds and kill you during that said window.

Some of the aforementioned boss traits are applied in package deals, too. This game's Iudex Gundyr equivalent, the literal tutorial "filter" boss ("git gud" or uninstall the game and try for a refund because you literally will not get to play the game if you can't beat it), Balteus, can zip around the area faster than you can track, is almost impossible to avoid getting hit by thanks to the literal hundreds of missiles, and is incredibly tanky with energy shields to boot. The only weapons you get at that point in the game to contend with his shields, are an intentionally-bad pulse gun and a sword you'll never get close enough to hit 'em with.

The aforementioned two-phase boss, is also a "filter" boss. It seems to be pretty common to burn through 50-75% of your ammo during Phase 1 because of the constant lockon-breaking (even applying to missiles that will suddenly lose lock and just... fly off) while the boss flies around the arena faster than you can follow. If you manage to bodybag the red-space-meth-fueled tincan, better hope you still have all your repair kits and enough ammo because if you don't, you may as well restart and do it over again because you won't have the resources to win Phase 2. Every tutorial I see about this boss, boils down to "use the known overpowered weapons and cheese it, that's the only actual way to win". It is, in my opinion, poor design to make a boss so insufferable that the only solution your players perceive to win.... is to all collectively jump for the same 4 weapons (Zimmerman shotguns, gatling guns, Songbird grenade cannons, and the Anti-Ice Worm Stun Needle) so that they can beat the bosses... and then put those weapons back on the shelf so they can continue the game in the ways they find fun and enjoyable. The fact that a small chosen few have "gotten gud" enough to beat these bosses without any weapons at all, just by punching and kicking, doesn't mean it's possible for the rest of us, either. Some people are just built different.

Said weapons are also, as I understand it, the most infamous and insufferable weapons in the current PvP meta: Ubiquitous, spammed to hell and back as the low-skill-floor option for dunking on people with, and thoroughly hated as a result by all but their abusers.

Their decision-making and logic behind nerfing weapons and how they'll be nerfed sucks, but the CEO and community management owned up to how much they screwed up with the Sony situation and then proceeded to go to bat for the playerbase. They are the reason Sony backed all the way down and learned their place, and the reason we'll be keeping the game.

We won.

Crashing to desktop every 5 minutes, just got the game as a gift and can't even play it.

Edit: So, I figured out how to revert backward to Legacy. LEGACY IS PLAYABLE AND WORKS. It's the new Seamless update that's broken and completely unstable. I DO recommend Legacy, I do NOT recommend Seamless until they fix the constant crash-to-desktop-with-no-error-message-or-crash-report issue.

Edit 6/24/23: Okay, I'm actually changing my review entirely after having run some math on the ACTUAL statistics of some of the weapons and having played 2.5x more. Originally, I thought I was just garbage at the game, or playing something wrong, or maybe I just didn't have good equipment yet and that's why I was getting shredded and couldn't accomplish anything. Turns out, no, that wasn't entirely it. While I will admit, I'm not great at the game, the "skill" ceiling is actually surprisingly low thanks to two specific facets:

The *extremely* low Time To Kill, for *specific* classes of weapons, and the problematic relationship this game has with *recoil*. See, the entire class of Submachine Guns in this game, by pure math, has a Time To Kill of between a 1/4 and 1/2 of a second, even *with* body armor that by all rights should defeat pistol rounds. The Kriss Vector, for example, fires at a blistering 1200 RPM, divide by 60 and that's 20 bullets a second, that deal 24 damage a pop for a total theoretical of 480DPS. According to the ingame Shooting Range, that's lethal 4-7 times over through the course of 1 40-round magazine. Even on the low end, that means that 10 rounds in half a second is enough to kill a player, possibly less if you can manage to hit a headshot during that blink-and-you-miss-it spray. And that entire spray, is nearly recoilless, where all other classes of weapons jump in 2 directions *incredibly* violently. The biggest offender being LMGs, for whom a deployed bipod and muzzlebreaks do *nothing* to assist in the massive flailing of the weapon. Put simply, the SMG "umbrella" is the easiest to use, and most lethal in less time than it takes to blink, while also being the most controllable, in the *entire* game.

And that's just it. "Less Time Than It Takes To Blink ". A human blink takes about 1/3 of a second from start to finish. That means that if you start blinking and someone comes around the corner with an SMG in this game, you'll have died before you open your eyes again. There is no opportunity to react or offer counterplay, this game right now is "Use an SMG or don't get to play". Even if you have your gun up and are ready to fire, trained on the corner they come around, as other weapons have a dramatically lower ROF and drastically higher recoil, they cannot deal the same amount of damage in the same fractional second. They lose, almost every time, save when armor ACTUALLY does its job... which isn't very common.

This is, currently, lending itself to a bit of a strange issue: The Assault class, named for (shocker) its only option of primary weapon class, is actually rarely taken in my experience, because a Medic is blatantly better at fighting. See, in this game, some hits will cause you to bleed, needing you to patch yourself up... but patching yourself up caps your HP to 25% of maximum, meaning you'll get obliterated by someone breathing in your general direction next time and need revived by another player (most of which will be too busy to care however, BECAUSE...). A Medic though, can bandage themselves faster, do it 20 times before running out, AND they have an infinite-use health kit than can heal them back to full... AND they get SMGs. This has lead to Rambo-Rushers taking off all their armor to move faster, packing an SMG and either flashbangs or frag grenades, ignoring their teammates and wounded, and tearing off at 50MPH guns-blazing straight to the top of the K/D leaderboard and leaving most everyone else behind them. And it's a problem. There are lobbies where a whole team is majority Medics, completely noncohesive, all ignoring each other if they get downed, just hunting for kills to the exclusion of all else... and that team often loses as every time one of the Rambos dies, their team loses a Respawn Ticket and once that number hits zero, game over.

The devs also have stated no intention of adding shotguns to provide a CQC counterplay to this unarmored methed-up bum-rush tactic because, quote, "they're hard to balance". Meanwhile, they've also got plans to add FaceIt, a kernel-level spyware rootkit of an AntiCheat that is *always* on and monitors *everything* you do even when the game itself isn't running, and it's in the game's EULA that they can sell any and all data they collect to FaceIt's potential buyers.

Plus no plans for community servers or custom games to play the other HALF of the gamemode roster any time soon, with classics like Gun Game, Deathmatch (Team and FFA), Infection, and some new Voxel gamemodes completely inaccessible.

To call back to my previous review, in categories:

- Vehicles are also still an issue, with HEAT and Tandem-Charge RPG rounds being better used against buildings and players (while Fragmentation is completely useless unless you land a direct hit against a single player, they have almost no splash damage, and you'd better hope you get a group with HEAT/Tandem because otherwise they'll all be revived in about 10 seconds and that rocket will have meant nothing), because vehicles can eat HEAT/Tandem like candy and simply not notice they've been hit until the 4th or 5th shot... meanwhile, by the time you've reloaded for your second shot because it takes forever, the vehicle has its gun(s) trained on you and is blowing you away or an SMG user has found you to turn you into ground meat.

-Grenade spam is STILL a problem, especially at chokepoints. Support, for all its godawful LMG performance thanks to abysmally-high recoil, can provide a MASSIVE number of grenades with ENORMOUS blast radius (Frags, impacts, flashbangs most common) to be lobbed down corridors and into buildings. If there is an objective indoors where you have to sit and defend, expect 20-30 frags to come rolling in and kill your entire squad, then another 20-30 frags about 5sec later once they've all resupplied at the Support's ammo box. Rinse and repeat.


So no, right now, I can't recommend the game. There's too much that needs to be fixed, and I'll be honest, if I could I'd probably be considering a refund right now because the average player will spend more time staring at the "You Died" screen than playing the game.

Rife with instant-kill mechanics + stunlocks that can kill the toughest dinos in the game (Cnidaria), dinos that can steal your stuff and disappear it making you waste time to remake it all only for the same thing to happen again (Pegomastax/Gulls), and blatantly unfair BS that you'd have to have memorized the wiki to know because there are no tutorials. I learned the hard way, after losing all my hard work, that Alpha dinos have 15x the health of a normal one and deal substantially more damage.

The game demands that you have better armor and weapons in order to play, then breaks them all the instant you get poked or just disappears your corpse all together so you can't even repair them IF you get your things back. It disincentivizes the behavior it demands from you constantly. Even in the "Easy" spawn locations there are dinos like the Therezinosaur that can instantly kill you even with lategame equipment, and you'd never know how dangerous they were unless you obsessively read the wiki.

Don't buy from this company, don't touch anything they sell, clearly they don't give a single damn about game design and making a game fair for the player.

Pitfalls that deal large amounts of damage in a game where healing is rare, enemies that can knock you into said pits, stunlocking the player to death, getting interrupted meaning you lose your charge of your attacks/go on cooldown while having done literally nothing, I-frames being borderline nonexistent...

The game is stacked against you and not in the fun way. A single mistake of ordinarily-insignificant proportions will end your run. Getting hit ONCE can kill you through no fault of your own. This game is a "Don't Get Hit" type of roguelike where if you are hit even once, you're screwed.

Error 18: Calypso has made it physically impossible for me to log into the game in any way, shape, or form.

Oh boy, I love starting out as a new player and getting repeatedly shredded in my Rating 1.0 tank because I've been up-tiered and am facing Rating 2.3 tanks driven by players with 1,000 hours in-game, who then hop in their premium bomber and shred me again a minute out of spawn.

This game needs separation between people who've played more than 1000 matches, and those who haven't played more than 10. The last time I played the game was in 2018, and I figured I'd try it again to see if it had gotten a bit more beginner-friendly and less depressing to start out in.... Turns out, nope.