This game sends you through the five stages of grief every time you launch it. It's agonizing and the game reeks of wasted potential. The atmosphere is so cool and a good AAA WW2 shooter with all the advancements in modern game developing sounds great on paper and is something I've been craving for a while. As usual with BF titles, there's plenty of fun and neuron stimulating progression, but the way it's handled could be better. And while so many of the design choices and new mechanics are great in theory, they're bogged down by their execution.

For example: The new squad revive system and reworking of medics is good, but the way spawning on squadmates works is mind-boggling. Instead of just being told you can't spawn on a squadmate that's in combat, the game does a series of dramatic GTA pan-ins, pans back out because the spawn isn't safe, then sends you to the map overview so you can't see what your squadmate is doing anymore. You attempt to spawn on them after 15 seconds of delays, oops they were in combat, back to the map overview again. You repeat this process 3 times until you get frustrated and concede to spawning on an objective, which then puts you 200m away from the point and you're forced to jog back to the fight. It's just an unnecessary departure from how spawning worked in the previous games.

However, the greatest offender is the Assignment system. Everyone on the dev team involved with designing this god-forsaken system should not be involved in any future Battlefield games. Battlefield's had some tedious and questionable assignments in the past, but the way they're handled in this game is a new level of terrible user experience. When you hit level 5 and 10 on your weapons, you unlock the Proficiency and Mastery assignments respectively.
These assignments give you the (admittedly very good looking) mint and gold skins for that weapon. This sounds like a fine way to unlock skins for your weapons, but each weapon part is its own assignment (with some exceptions, and the amount you have to do depends on the weapon), so at most you end up doing 7 proficiency and 7 mastery challenges for your weapon. The early assignments range from things like just getting kills or kills while in objective areas with a larger cumulative goal, or a smaller in one round goal if you're gamer enough, and half of these challenges you can do without playing like an idiot or deliberately throwing to get your challenge done. But eventually the cumulative challenges are phased out and it's either in one life or one round, and the challenges themselves start to get asinine.

There's no way these assignments were play-tested by the devs. Kills under 10m with bolt action rifles in 1 life/round, kills over 30m with SMGs that fire marshmallows at that range, 10 headshots while in an objective zone in one life with the semi auto rifles. Most of these later assignments require a perfect storm of a match to pull it off: Your team has to be good enough to secure map control, but not good enough to roll the enemy team because you need the match to last for most of these challenges. You need the enemies to be have no situational awareness and for all the objective ones you have to disadvantage yourself by sitting on the point yourself for some and waiting for your enemies to step on the point for others, instead of just defending/attacking the objective from a better angle off the point.

Okay so the challenges themselves suck balls, great, but you're blazing through the majority of them one round after the other because you're on a hot-streak. Do the challenges automatically roll over into the next one after you complete them? Of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ course not, and you can't change assignments during the waiting for players phase before the match starts, during the match, or after the match. You have to back out to the main menu, leaving a lobby or squad that you were having fun in, go to the assignment page, equip the next assignment, then if you have a friend in the game, attempt to rejoin the match, and chances are you get put in a queue and miss half of the match. Sometimes multiple people in your group have assignments to progress so you all do a dance alternating people into the lobby so you can keep playing there. And if you start doing your assignments once you hit weapon level 5, the maximum amount of times you'll be doing this dance of dumb is around 14 times (you can alternatively wait until both the proficiencies and masteries are unlocked at the same time and do them together). I've maxed out and completed the assignments for plenty of the weapons, and they're a dampen on the experience every time.

There's no anti-cheat and it's hard to find a match that isn't either riddled with hackers or max-level players sapping all enjoyment out of the game. You get very used to seeing the same names in lobbies and just letting out a groan that it's gonna be one of those matches. Weapon "balancing" is frustrating but that's just par for the course with a DICE game. A lot of the maps are also unenjoyable and poorly balanced.

With all these complaints aside, the visuals and sound design are incredible. DICE and the Frostbite engine always knock it out of the park when it comes to atmosphere. While the gunplay can feel off, the guns themselves look and sound awesome. Firing an MG on a wooden floor and hearing all of the casings rolling on the ground as you fire is so satisfying. Unloading an M1 Garand clip into someone, hearing the satisfying headshot ding followed by the Garand's ping just feels good. Plinking enemies with a suppressed Grease Gun from smoke as they scramble around trying to find you is nice. The game just has an inherent cinematic quality to it, and it's great in that regard. The character voices and voice lines have the usual DICE charm that you can chuckle about if you're not taking it too seriously.

I love the character and weapon customization, and while it's not all historically accurate, the rule of cool is in effect for a lot of it. The bigger issue being that a lot of the cosmetics are overpriced and bundled with things you don't care about to increase their price or are locked behind your standard rotating FOMO shop. Also as someone who got into the game near the end of its life cycle, finding out that a lot of the cool cosmetics were login rewards or in booster packs during the game's past seasons in disheartening, but I guess that's a token Live Service game moment.

There's a large focus on squad-play in this game, and if you have any plans of playing this game, don't go at it alone. Having friends with you as you trudge through the hellscape that is this game makes the experience so much better. In both playing efficiently and dealing with frustation, having the lads there to back you up and laugh off (or share in) the misery makes the game infinitely better.

In summary, the game has some sort of twisted, alluring quality to it. I can't stop playing it, despite how rage-inducing this game is. For some most likely masochistic reason, I keep coming back to it. Even with all my grievances, it's a game that I look forward to hopping on with the lads and playing. And even though it usually sours pretty quickly, that doesn't stop us from playing it for hours. I guess I'd recommend the game, if you're a WW2 fan and need a more arcade style FPS, as it could definitely use the players.

This game has come a long way, and while there's still some underlying issues (namely with the content pipeline and monetization), the core gameplay experience is incredible.

With the release of the long-overdue crafting update, one of the final roadblocks holding back the player experience itself has been torn down.

So where are we at now? For the positives, we've got a co-op shooter oozing with:

• Engaging and visceral gameplay with a fair skill curve that's gratifying to master where both melee and ranged combat are enjoyable. For the most important aspect of a game, they nailed it, and it keeps me coming back above all else.
  
• Beautiful atmosphere in a cool universe (the level designs are seriously outstanding, and do the 40k universe justice).
  
• A wide variety of viable weapons and builds for each class which are all fun in their own ways. You can make pretty much anything work with a decent build as long as you have the mechanics down, which is great.
  
• Neuron-tickling sound design (there's not enough appreciation for how punchy everything sounds/feels), also the enemy ques are distinct and reliable (about 95% of the time).
  
• A healthy amount of different missions to play, with different locales and objectives (this definitely wasn't always the case, but we've got a nice variety now).
  
• A great cast of charming playable and supporting characters with tons of memorable and hilarious lines and fun interactions, hell even a lot of the enemies are super quotable.
  
• A soundtrack that goes hard and sets the tone very well.
  
• Pretty decent mod support (with relatively easy setup) to pick up any of the slack the devs might've left.

Unfortunately this game does still have its faults, and ones that have been present since launch or have only gotten worse over time, such as:

• Performance/Optimization is still not the greatest, but it has taken significant strides and the game runs well enough at this point (and it runs WAY better than Space Marine 2 does for me).
  
• The content pipeline still flows at a pretty glacial pace, and while we have enough to tide us over, it would be nice if new content was delivered more frequently in this live-service game.
  
• And the big one, the cosmetic situation is still pretty bad. There's been improvements made with a larger pool of unlockable/free cosmetics, yes, but the premium shop has only gotten worse through the years. Prices have continually increased over time for items that are the same or worse quality (effortless recolors of existing items) and in bundles featuring less content.
  The most recent shop items are a prime example: being just an outfit (Headgear, Torso, and Pants) for 2900 funny money that's similar to an older outfit that came in a full bundle with an outfit, weapon skins and charms for 2400 funny money two years ago. It doesn't help that most of the outfits released feel like compromises made to nickel and dime people that wish to stand out while waiting for cool designs that people actually want (outfits that have been datamined since launch, mind you). Not to say there aren't any good cosmetics in the game, because there are good options available for each class, but they're sparser than they should be.

Those gripes aside though, the core game itself is still phenomenal and I'm still not tired of it, even 360+ hours later. It's also a blast with your friends, with plenty of organic moments in gameplay that are either cool or just hilarious, as any good co-op game should be. And the adrenaline of pulling off a clutch on the higher difficulties against all the odds is a thrill that I don't experience too often in other games.

As of the time of rewriting my review, the game's on sale for $20, which is a steal for the potential hours of entertainment you can get out of this game. Even at its base price, I would say it's more than worth it if you enjoy co-op/horde shooters. I'm pleased to finally be able to recommend this game without the caveat that it's in a rough place, so if you're interested, I would definitely pull the trigger on it.