Recent reviews by Murdurmuffin

This was tough, but I gave a positive rating based on comparison to other titles in recent years. It's something of a mix and experimentation of popular game formulas and in many ways that's a good thing. In some ways it's a bad thing. I ran out on the Steam character limit :(

3 primary components:
Blackhawk Down campaign (unreleased)
Warfare (Battlefield style, big map, big team, combined arms gametypes)
Operations (an extraction shooter mode)

Pro/Con
+ Smooth and mostly intuitive experience
+ Slightly above modern average audio quality
+ Graphics meet expectations
+ AI is actually pretty decent, could use some more variety
+ Appropriately deep weapon customization with detailed stat readouts
+ Weapon attachment "Calibration" (CoD's "Tuning") system actually gives valuable tradeoff choices to the player
+ Gunbuild sharing system is built into the UI
+ Many "expected day 1" features like Leaderboards, Friends, VOIP, etc. are NOT broken or absent.
+ Cheap Battlepass / MTX compared to other current titles... on top of being F2P
/
- "Hero Character" Operators as the player's avatar (there are aspects that objectively degrade other parts of the experience)
- Mandatory SBMM in all game modes
- Currently available Warfare game types are too similar, you might not even notice what you are playing if you don't try and it becomes repetitive even with the decent map selection at launch
- Gun balance is set at a frustratingly unrealistic meta that makes the majority of options utterly irrelevant
- Weapon attachment stat bonuses/negatives often make no logical sense
- TTK is blinding fast, offer's no opportunity for counterplay unless the opponent is potato
- Operations Ammo vs Armor mechanics effectively neuter competitiveness between players and channel players to care near exclusively about the former
- BattlePass contains packs of premium ammo, directly creating a Pay-to-Win transaction for Operations players, despite the devs and marketing proudly proclaiming "absolutely no pay to win"
- Kernel Level Anti-Cheat that must be removed manually by Windows Command Line after uninstallation of the game

Commentary / Rant
A lot of what the devs have done is superb work and many things that existed in different games have been pulled together into one environment. Literally GG, but I can't put my full support behind it in good conscience.

Operators (blend of Battlefield's class system and Apex/Overwatch "Hero Characters")
Currently there is something significant to complain about each of them and I find myself annoyed with the problems each presents on a constant, constant, CONSTANT basis. Medics fill every battle with smoke, stalling the fight entirely with blind fire at other tracers, or players rushing through to their deaths out of frustration. Assaults make sure that is a non-stop cacophany of explosions, also stalling the fight, and producing hopeless retreat-charge-die loops for minutes on end. One of the Engineers can send out an AoE that causes extreme blur and screen shake, as well as screwing with the player's ability to aim or hear. One of the Recons can send out a drone in a straight line that repeatedly flashbangs everyone in the area. Least of all these is the other Recon character that can shoot out an arrow that highlights enemies on your screen within a small area and VERY momentarily does the same when that Recon hits an enemy with a bullet ("least of" because it's the only one that doesn't have detrimental effects for your own team). With the classes all firing off their abilities, the obscuring visuals and deafening sound just simply doesn't stop. On MANY occasions I given up trying to break a stalemate and just quietly watched... a third of the match timer can go by and no real progress has been made by either side, you can't hear ANYTHING except gunfire and explosions, and you can't actually SEE the enemy for more than a couple seconds every minute or so (which feels like an eternity). It's more than senory overload, it's just... pointless attrition, boring stalemates, and frustrating debilitations. It. Sucks. I don't believe they will EVER have a place in the Operations mode. If the reasons why need to be explained then you just fundamentally don't understand the core reasons why people play extraction shooters. This game is trying to also be a hero shooter and the mix just doesn't jive man.

TTK = extremely short
Overwhelming majority fight range = CQB
Only guns worth using = High RPM AR's/SMG's
Battle Rifles = insane recoil w/ low hit rate, damage values kill only 1 hit sooner
Damage dropoff range = 30m you are dealing 10-12.5 damage per hit against 100hp characters
Headshot multipliers only change hits-to-kill within 10-15m
Soldier can survive 2 headshots from literally any caliber at point blank range
Marksman and Sniper rifles = headshots only or be the assist generator for the team
I hate all of this. Is it really too much to ask for guns to at least be within the ballpark of realistic damage, recoil, and range? Need every shooter I play be a nutt-to-butt sprayfest? Is the concept of a Battle Rifle equivalent to particle physics? Apparently the glory days of BF: Bad Company / BF3 sniping and counter-sniping are long gone... devs just hate snipers having fun and I don't understand why they are in most games anymore.

Vehicle combat has a couple problems.
Spawning is 1/type/64-player-team with 1m+ cooldown after destruction. Instead, I'd like to see both multiple spawns and some kind of merit system that recharged slowly (or faster with using the vehicle well).
The rock-paper-scissors of the vehicle types is also out of whack. Each not having the tools to deal with one of the others would be fine IF there was some kind of coordination or strategy involved with other vehicles that did have those tools. Both the Anti Air and Tank LAV missiles have a ridiculously short lock-on range, meaning they either have to be in the thick of the fight where they are vulnerable, or on the edge and pray the threat comes to them. Tanks are at the utter mercy of Air, and Air just has to remember to bombard from long range to stay alive indefinitely. All vehicles are nearly defenseless against a team of pissed off infantry who decide to switch to Engineer and pump out endless rockets because death means relatively little to them. If you are lucky enough to fully crew your vehicle you might have a chance at pushing in to where the fight is at. At the same time, the Engineers (and 1/2 assault class) are the only infantry with ANY tools to fight vehicles so F-you if you don't happen to be one of those guys at any given moment. Frustration both ways.

Operations
Ammo and Armor are split into tiers. White<Green<Blue<Purple<Gold.
If ammo = target armor, normal damage.
If ammo < armor, - damage.
If ammo > armor, + damage.
The better ammo is always the survivor and a greater discrepancy might mean the difference of 1-5 bullets or .2-.7 seconds. This creates two problems.
First, high tier ammo is the only thing that matters. You are far better off buying a faster TTK against ANY target vs buying less than 1s of more life against a few ammo types.
Second, it creates an economy and success (or BattlePass P2W) snowball. Ammo is spent whether you win or lose a fight, and it's price is high. Players that can't pay that will lose more and more often, players who can will win more and more often... regardless of skill. Both will have to work harder and longer than the guy who just swiped his card for level skips on the BP for ammo crates. Remove this one mechanic or make high tier ammo rare and player trade only, then I think they might have the perfect balance between the casual DMZ and hardcore EFT. They are SO CLOSE to making a really good Extraction Shooter that MOST players could enjoy. But currently these mechanics break it.

I wish I had read up on this company and their reputation.

Pretty decent game, maybe a step or two below Baldur's Gate 3, but still fun and I've managed to enjoy just over 200hrs. That said, I feel cheated by the game on a regular basis (like having a hard cap on hit chance being 95% no matter your actual stats, and still missing those shots 50% of the time). I can deal with that, but what I can't tolerate is getting me invested in the game and have a TON of leadup where I'm doing great learning the systems, making builds, and not having too much trouble just challenging enough... and then BOOM out of nowhere an unwinnable nightmare scenario that prevents me from completing any more of the game.

I hit the beginning of Act 4 and go to do the main quest. I have already done everything else I can do, traded for best gear I can get, done side missions, every little bit of content I could do before moving on. So I choose my party and get to it. I make my dialogue choices, and receive a permanent debuff before ever actually getting to fight. Ok, whatever I've dealt with these things before, charging ahead. Get to actual exploring and fighting. Guess what, it's just a labyrinth of traps and surprise fights. After the first one, which involved a mechanic where an invulnerable dude summons unlimited demons every single turn until you somehow get through the horde to physically touch and kill him... I find out that debuff I got ALSO prevents me from returning to my ship to either rest (heal traumas) or swap out party members. I'm stuck with who I have with me. Next encounter, it's a massive demon tank that gets extra attacks, sets the room on fire, and heals after EVERY SINGLE CREATURE'S TURN. Whatever, it was challenging but I killed it without suffering too much. Third encounter, ANOTHER massive demon tank with Heretic Astartes escorts, and guess what his mechanic is? Only one specific party member can damage him, for everyone else it has 150%+ armor and massive deflection (which just flat negates damage before other modifiers). It was painful, but I somehow still killed it first try, through both phases. THEN, FINALLY, I get to the fight that is my whole reason for being here which deserves it's own section.

Act 4, The Siege, Uralon the Cruel (in case you want to see it on YT).
Boss bastard has 50% dodge, 75% armor, and 9 deflection for every living allied Astartes (there's 4 of them at around 700-800HP each). He is an Officer type, so his schtick is giving his allies buffs and extra turns on top of what I'm about to list.
1. He gives all his Astartes an extra turn, every turn, and 3 of them have burst fire bolters, 3 attacks per turn, and run and gun (which lets them move and attack again after their attacks); 1 of them has a heavy flamethrower. This is in addition to the extra turn ability YOUR officers can use.
2. Any target that is on fire takes massively increased damage that lowers their armor and negates their deflection.
3. Causing perils of the warp (by Psyker power use) gives him an extra turn.
4. He can summon a demon every 10 turns, BUT he has a heroic action that let him summon 3 demons back to back to back in 1 turn.
5. If one of his body guards gets to 50% HP, he sacrifices 20% of his HP to give them twice their max HP in temp HP. For free. Essentially, if you can't 1 shot them, just bend over and say thank you.
Oh, and 1500HP for himself.
6. He gets to act first, and his lackeys mostly get to go before your party members do.

I spent 3 hours trying to survive longer than 2 rounds. The first time I didn't even get a single turn, just watched my entire party die 1 after the other like it was a cutscene. Turns out, unless you have a "absolute meta" build for every member in your party, you literally can not win... which is what Owlcat is known for doing in their "games". ♥♥♥♥ this. The only thing that's keeping me from uninstalling RIGHT NOW is the idea of downloading the popular mod that lets you give your self items and change parameters of the game, just so I can ♥♥♥♥ on the developers work any time I feel like it. It really pisses me off they've done this and wasted so much of my time.

Don't make my mistake. Just watch a free playthrough on YT, it's not worth the other frustrations throughout the game that I didn't even bother mentioning.

If you don't already know how awesome this game is, you've been living under a rock.

Karlach <3 gave me a Tiefling attraction I didn't know was possible.

Steam needs a "Maybe" or "Mixed" rating. I'm going to fire off a few pointers and quick summaries to keep this review informative and short.

Campaign: Very pretty, cool environments and scenes, short and repetitive. Runs just over half the advertised playtime on "average" difficulty.
*SPOILER*
Has anyone else noticed that it's like 90% copy/paste from the original? Literally the same protagonist character making the same decisions, ally character personalities saying the same annoying lines, and it's even the exact same MacGuffin from the original... the only things that changed are the faction skins/names, and the ending turns out differently. Not exactly an original script here.
*END SPOILER*

Co-op Multiplayer (Operations): Same positives as the campaign, however with additional negatives. Class system is essentially just restrictions on what you can do with the campaign character, and you will rarely play the class you want because only one class is allowed per team, so always have 1-2 backup classes you can enjoy or just don't play.

PvP Multiplayer: I'm typically a PvP junkie, but I just didn't care to try it out. I've seen several headlines and videos discussing balance issues, useless classes, OP classes, lack of depth... you will have to make your own decision here, but I can't imagine that it's actually good or bad enough to tip the scales.

Difficulty: Not sure what they were going for, but the difficulty feels way out of whack. In Campaign, I'm facing adequate challenge on the 3rd (second hardest) difficulty "Veteran", with some spots of absolute insanity. In Co-oP Operations, I'm struggling to get any completions on the 2nd (second lowest) difficulty "Average". Parry, Block, and Dodge mechanics need a lot of work for an enemy count this high, and there needs to be some kind of AI/mechanic difference between difficulty levels... other than HP sponges. It really kills the immersion and power fantasy if you are forced to darksouls roll away from a mob for a full minute or run out of ammo before the wave encounter is even half over. Also, getting into a crowd for melee usually means your health is just getting chipped away because the enemy can hit you a LOT more often than you can hit them, even with your heavy knockback attacks. Snipers can shoot you even while you are in an execution animation, gunstrike animations take too long and the armor return from them just immediately gets lost... there's a lot of fine tuning and mechanics reworks that need to be done.

Conclusion: I don't feel like an Astartes playing this game, I feel like a dude covered in martial arts padding with nerf guns and foam swords. However, with 2 other friends, it's not a bad time. I can't say I'll be playing this game on my own very much. On one hand, it feels like a relentless reaction game more than a horde shooter, like Shadow of Mordor. On the other hand, it doesn't really have the depth of world/mechanics, nor is there much to mix up the repetitive missions. It's VERY beautiful... just, not exactly addictive or "challenging". It can be oppressively hard if you want it to be, but not in a way that's fun to overcome.

I'm gonna go play Deep Rock Galactic and WH40k Darktide now, hope this helped!

I put off playing Hunt Showdown for years, and finally took the dive about 6 months before the "re-release" update for UE5. While I regret waiting to actually discover this game, I will do my best to review as it exists in 2024 because quite a bit changed.

Gameplay: This is a thinking man's game. Sure, your aiming skills need to be on point as the weapons cycle and reload quite slowly, and low bullet velocity means you will need to get used to leading your shots on moving targets. However, SO MUCH MORE of this game is in how you observe the signs around you and put them together into intel you can act on. You will learn what the ambient noise sounds like, and more importantly what it doesn't sound like. You will notice small things like a half opened ammo box, an unlit lantern, or a horse braying that seemed to be cut short... pay attention and before long you can tell a story of which team is aggressively dominant, when to expect or set an ambush, or about how many seconds you have before half the server is going to show up with a claim on your blood. You might think, "ah all that is non-sense I just want to go in and shoot stuff." but in this game you just became the prey. Preparation, patience, and decisiveness make all the difference. Outsmarting your opponent makes all the difference. A fight could be over in seconds or it could take 10 minutes, and that is mostly based on the decisions and mistakes everyone allowed themselves to make. Early on, it could feel like most people are cheating in some way, but I assure you that while it exists, that is a rare occurrence. I've been playing for less than a year and already have seen massive improvement and change from how I started. There is so much to learn and develop, this is easily a 5 or 10 year game you could play and not get bored of... if you can stick with it and learn from your mistakes. There isn't another game out there that recreates the experience of hunting, let alone hunting intelligent prey, or being hunted, quite like this. It is also far less punishing than other titles in the "Extraction Shooter" genre. You are matched with other players in a loose (and I stress 'loose') skill bracket, and losing your character and gear is not so punishing that you can't recover from a string of losses. Every weapon and almost every tool is viable or has a "frequent niche" use, while particular choices can definitely get you an advantage no player will be truly outclassed by another from loadout alone. If that weren't enough, you can get basic characters and gear for free too. The rewards for success are also fairly generous, Just winning once has allowed me to fund 2-3 more runs, or 1-2 runs of my favorite top-of-the-line kit. While some of the AI mechanics like spawning and aggro could be tweaked to be better and more consistent, the overall experience is award worthy. The memories you can get out of this game's experience are phenomenal, whether they be a high or low.

UI/UX: The new tile based "Hulu" UI is frustrating and incredibly inefficient. While you can generally find what you need intuitively, navigating the menus and doing the basic common tasks is laborious tedium. You will often find yourself "going into a screen" to change something or find information, then having to back out 1-2 screens to change or remember something else directly relevant, only to then dive into the previous screens again just to do what you originally wanted... and repeat until you are finally ready to play the game. Access and navigation to what you want is unnecessarily separated and buried under multiple action steps, generally doubling or tripling the time it would take, for example, to change a gun and it's ammo to synergize with the traits you've chosen. Honestly it's nearly bad enough to consider firing the person who made it. Normally I steer away from such a recommendation, but it has been THAT frustrating to deal with on a regular basis.

Monetization: MTX prices are earnable through play (I earned enough to get the new battle pass for free), and fairly reasonable for what you get. There are no P2W features, everything you get is either cosmetic or "early access" to new equipment that has yet to be a noticeable balance problem. You could spend a chunk of the average person's paycheck to get one of the new guns before most others unlock it, play, and immediately lose it to someone who just logged in with a free kit for their warm-up game... and they might not even take it off your corpse because what they have is not only just as viable, they've been practicing with it for months or years and deem it better for their style of play. I'll also say that the cosmetics you do get, free, earned, or paid, are better than most games premium options. Someone, or several people, at Crytek really puts a lot of love into their work. I usually don't buy cosmetics, I'm one of those people that fondly remember buying a game once and having access to every bit of content it contained. However, I've purchased 4 and earned several others that I really love in Hunt Showdown. I have not yet regretted supporting the continued development of the game in this way, and I really hope they can maintain this balance.

Rise up, dead man. Hunt.

Was really looking forward to this game. It has massive problems. Tried waiting until a couple patches came out, still immensely frustrating to play.

-LZ/Deployment mechanics: 16 people on a team, max 4 helicopters active at one time. This means you can be waiting for 10 minutes just to hitch a 5-20 minute ride to an actual gameplay area... or walk for 40 minutes. Your choice.

-AI balance is terrible: You can be playing for an hour and not get shot a single time, then suddenly die to a single bullet to the chest or head from any distance. Meanwhile, unless you get a headshot every AI combatant can take anywhere between 3 and 20 bullets to kill, even though they aren't wearing any armor. It's extremely inconsistent and you will end up carrying an AK just so you can scavenge ammo... because you will need a TON of it. Additionally, the AI can shoot while strafing side to side just fast enough so that you can't hit them consistently. Other times they stand perfectly still like paper targets. It's worse than Escape From Tarkov Scavs from 3 years ago.

-NPC Quest system: Extremely frustrating to spend 40 minutes looking for a key, or building, or other objective only to find out another player has grabbed it and you have to wait for a local reset to have the needed item respawn. I've been stuck on 1 quest for a week because I'm never the first person to be there. Can't do other quests because the vendors won't offer any more until I complete this one. If you are playing with friends, everyone has to complete quests separately. For example, a quest for kill 15 enemies in x location means YOU kill 15 enemies. Every kill a squad member makes doesn't count for you, and god help if someone defends themselves against a "Captain" that only spawns once every 30 minutes. You have to wait for the respawn to get that kill. Most of the quests are "fetch this item" or "deliver this item" and the descriptions are frustratingly vague. This is NOT what I was looking forward to when I heard we would have quests that were about figuring things out. This isn't a puzzle, it's a "walk around for an hour until you get a hud notification you found the 2ft area we want you to find".

-Vendors: They offer items that attach to other items you can't buy yet. Example, you can buy backup iron sights at Trader lvl 1, but you can't buy the correct handrail to actually attach and use them until a later level (10+ quests later btw). There's also a lot of confusion about what parts need other parts, or how to attach things on guns. Vendors straight up won't buy some loot you find, and the only loot worth selling is spare guns from the field.

-Loot/Inventory: This game was not built with looting in mind. You can carry 1 extra rifle in a special slot of a backpack. Most backpacks don't have the internal space to carry anything significant. Most loot out there is food and water, or other packs that you have to put into your inventory just to search (you won't have room so just ignore them). Btw, you have to eat and drink constantly, as if it were an overtuned hardcore survival game. You will actually save more time if you just dump your gear at base every so often and let yourself die.

I could go on, but I'm as bored of writing this review as I am of playing the game.

This game needs another year or two in development, regardless of what the youtube influencers say.

You are at a restaurant, eating a deliciously juicy cheese burger, when the manager walks up to your table. You smile at him, because you are thoroughly enjoying your burger. He smiles at you. The burger is taken from your buttery hands, the bun is peeled off gingerly, and the cheese is scraped with a knife. The manager states that practically 30% of their burgers are ordered with cheese, and it's a problem. Is it a big problem? He doesn't know, but he's come to fix it for you. In place of the cheese he spreads a thick layer of some kind of greenish brown paste, replaces the bun, and gently slides the burger into your hands. "A burger for everyone is a burger for no one" he says with a smile, "We are so glad you care about our burgers and will strive every day to earn your buck." As he walks away, your bewilderment only grows... the... thing in your hands now smells sharply of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and you think something is MOVING in that freshly applied paste. So what is next? Do you take another bite?

These days I wish that if a developer reserves the right to change a product after it has been purchased, the customer should be allowed to reserve the right to instantaneous no-questions-asked refund. I payed for a cheeseburger, not swine scat. Yet, there is no way for me to go back to my cheeseburger and I'm stuck with this awful feeling in my stomach.

Ok, why is this story relevant to Helldivers 2? It began as a ridiculously entertaining, for the pure sake of fun game. You couldn't surf far on the internet without seeing downright cinematic clips of gamers doing heroic, silly, and beautiful things with each other... and to each other. Before we move on, it is important to note that it had, I can't believe I'm saying this, a consumer friendly and fair MTX model. Like the days of old, you could earn all things in the game, just by playing the game. Then the ♥♥♥♥ came. People cried. Then it came again. People moaned. And again. People... quit.

Gameplay: Combat has been heavily disincentivised. That's right, a horde shooter where you are actively encouraged NOT to shoot the horde. If you do, it will take half a magazine to kill a single enemy screaming for your blood (if you hit the "weak spots"), it's screams will instantly spawn it's entire extended family right beside you just out of view, and you will run out of ammo ONLY if you are extremely heroic and manage to run dip-dodge-duck-and-dive long enough to actually use the bullets in your gun. You think I'm joking. You are wrong. You will not survive, you will die screaming in frustration and covered if not drowning in blood and alien ♥♥♥. Let's be real honest here, after 4 airstrikes, a 500kg bomb, an orbital laser strike, and all of the grenades and rockets your team could possibly let fly... you will still be swimming in bloodthirsty monsters long before high command deems you worthy of further support. 20 lives will be sent and lost in hell before you will be granted any relief. Every time players find a good weapon or useful tool it is quickly "balanced" out of relevancy by nerfs. Like taking your car with 3 flat tires into the shop, only to have the mechanic blow the last tire out so it's all even again. The days of having fun shooting aliens and robots in this game are gone. All that is left is sickening disappointment and the stain of frustration upon once fond memories.

I have a dream... that one day gaming will be a landscape of adventure and fun for all mankind, truly free from exploitation, exclusion, and corporate toxicity.

I love Magic the Gathering. It's one of the most complex and interesting games to play, easy to learn hard to master.

I can not put into words how much I hate MtG: Arena. I don't care what anyone says, the matchmaking is rigged to pit you against decks that are built to counter whatever you made your deck out of. Sure, there is an answer within Magic to just about everything else in Magic and that's what makes it so fun to play. But this game's matchmaking exploits this fact to guess what, encourage players to buy more card packs. You build a deck, win a couple games, lose 25 games. You edit your deck to compensate for some of the problems you were encountering or try a variation of the strategy and it might work for 1-2 games before you are immediately facing more direct counters to what you just built. It repeats ad-nausium. I've played every color, color combo, and even several "meta-decks" that are supposed to have 60%+ winrates, I've ranked in platinum multiple seasons, it doesn't matter. You will lose the majority of games you play, making you think if you just had other cards you'd do better, only to find out you are stuck in the same boat.

You might say "That's insane, they can't put you against the perfect counter all the time." Well it doesn't, just MOST of the time, and it's possible because multiple people are all being cycled as your opponents. They get to win their one game against you, then they lose against decks tailored against them. It's a massive depressing cycle and I hate it. There's meme decks, sweat decks, and everything in between. But you will face whatever can kill your deck 72/100 times (yes, I played the exact same deck 100 times with no changes just to get a statistic). You like Red aggro? Black sacrifice and recycle? Enjoy playing against blue/white control and lifegain almost exclusively.

Also, the RNG behind the draw/shuffle system is ASS. I can't tell you how many times I've lost to mana starve or drown, or gotten the card I needed 1-3 turns too late even with a statistical probability being in my favor. I've watched it happen to my opponents too and those feel like cheap unearned wins.

♥♥♥♥ WotC. Sincerely.

I wish Steam had a "maybe" recommendation category.

The game is good fun. It's challenging, intense, and thoughtful. Surprisingly very bug light at this stage as well. It is easily worth the $6 sale price I picked it up for. I chose this instead of "Ready or Not" (RoN) because frankly I wasn't sure I was ready to spend $30 on that Early Access title and this was a much easier sell. The two games are quite similar so comparisons will be made for those looking at both games.

Pros for ZeroHour:
+Slightly more feature richness in gun building, for example you can get activator paddles that activate your laser/light during a specific aim state
+Planning stage that allows you a blueprint map of the AO that can be drawn on and coordinate entry plans
+More nuance in Rules of Engagement mechanics, for example enemies actually have a chance of surrendering when yelled at, or may fake surrender only to try shooting you, this feels better than RoN's aimbotty criminals and doesn't punish you as heavily for instances of clearly justified use of lethal force.

However... there's a few cons you may want to consider.
-Overall less depth in loadouts, gadgets, gear than RoN has.
-Clunkier controls than RoN, overall not as smooth of an experience to move, shoot, manipulate weapons, etc.
-PvP is pretty much only empty lobbies and a bunch of friends filling a lobby. I looked for hours there wasn't anything in between. You can pretty much consider this part of the game dead unless you have a small fraternity interested in playing PvP with you.
--!--Deeply invasive Denuvo anti-cheat is woefully unnecessary and I wish I had known before I installed the game. I get that developers don't have a lot of ways to cheaply combat cheating scum, but I don't think I'll ever be comfortable or happy with this. It's a serious malware risk, do your research. BE WARNED.

Overall I'd say get this game if you want a cheap entry into SWAT sim... oh and are willing to sell your computer's soul to unknown 3rd parties. If you aren't willing, and want a more polished and detailed game to play, get Ready or Not. Find it on sale if you have to, because it's definitely worth the upgrade.

I consider myself an advanced, but not master strategist. I've played lots of Battletech/Mechwarrior games, turn based strategy games, and I'm familiar with the mechanics.

This game is just brutally hard. RNG screws you repeatedly, usually when you absolutely need it to go your way, and the AI isn't smart but usually given a huge advantage. Battle after battle I have reloaded saves to try different strategies and it just doesn't matter. Outnumbered, outgunned, outtonned, and no way out. Having your entire lance focus firing down one mech for 3 turns with very little effect while getting your own mechs focused down one at a time by an enemy with more individual turns than you can have is incredibly frustrating. I can't even articulate exactly what is wrong outside of action economy, but this game will punish you for playing it. There's tons of posts out there of people asking for help and they are told one of three things:

1. It's easy, git gud and stop asking for your hand to be held
2. Here's the basic tips of strategy games and the fundamentals of Battletech (which you should already know before buying the game)
3. Just max your armor values and play as safe as possible.

None of these things help and there's enough people saying it's a problem the rest of the community should listen.

Don't waste your money, if you want to play with mechs do yourself a favor and play the tabletop or buy a different game.