Recent reviews by mikta

Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion,
followed by theft, murder of endangered species, property damage, illegal drug purchase, simping, assist in jailbreak, mishandling of radioactive materials, graverobbing, arson and finally illegal posession of nuclear weapons (albeit he wasn't aware of it). Also this a name of one cute little videogame where you literally play as turnip doing some mandatory assignments from Mayor because you refused to pay taxes.

TBCTE is pretty caual and can be 100% beatenn in 3 hours. Gameplay largely consists of running from point A to point B. Inbetween you explore, fight, solve simle puzzles, read funny dialogs and rip up government documents.

During exploration you find character who possibly give you simple side quest of finding and delivering item which might require you to do some backtracking. In the end you are rewarded with hats, more hilarious dialogs and documents to rip up. Documents and hats can also be found in the world.

Doing anything in the game you might stuck into enemies. During exploration combat is not mandatory and also quite borring. I personally find it more fun to run past enemies. However bossfights are different story. Mechanics that are used in puzzles and exploration are also usefull in combat overall (again if you decide to partake in it at all) and even more so during bossfights. Couple of bosses are particularry challenging while others can be beaten in first attempt by virtually anyone.

The game has barely any plot. You just complete assignments for mayor and then fight him in the end. Nevertheless it can give you wide range of emotions because of subplots that occur during assignments and lore both of which I will not spoil here. You can laugh from plentiful memes everywhere in the game and them become sad after meeting [REDACTED]

TBCTE is amusing game with lots of memes, funny dialogs and couple good bosses. Overall I recommend.

The game used to have a lot of technical issues on release which are now fixed. However gameplay issues largely were not.

**Map design**

It seems that initially, the devs designed maps with heavy usage of vehicles (non armored pickups with heavy machine guns) in mind. Said vehicles usually have very low survivability and aren't very fun to play as. Note, that these two are not in causal relationship. For vehicles to move around, maps have to have wide open areas which are very hard for infantry to traverse. The worst offender is perhaps Crossing where, being infantry is absolutely miserable. And on the lesser offenders vehicles are boring to play because a single road through the map is all that's available to you for traversal. It appears as if the devs recognized their mistake and firstly, edited playable areas on existing maps to make them a bit more welcoming to infantry but, I feel that it didn't fully fix the issue, and secondly, minimized vehicles on new maps added to the game after release.

The main gamemode of the game is called Push. Here one team defends series of objectives while the other attempts to capture them. Only one objective is present in play-area at a time. Once the objective is captured the next is unlocked and so on until objectives run out. Each map can be played in both directions: North-to-South or South-to-North (or the same but with East and West). Most of the maps are good only when played in one direction. The best example of this is Sinjar. More on that in the next paragraph.

The opposing factions, Security forces and Insurgents, have various types of fire-support available to them such as artillery or air-strikes. Security have way better options such as calling in attack helicopter or gunship (Black Hawk with door-minigun) which, makes the matter described the paragraph above far worse. Attacking as Insurgent sometimes is absolutely miserable due to combined factors of map imbalance and inferior firepower.

The negatives being said most of the maps are very enjoyable and a lot more dense with places to fight in. I especially like CQB environments with lots of small buildings to clear which was barely present in Insurgency Standalone. This, perhaps was the main factor that kept me in the game far longer than in the previous installment.

**Gunplay**

The gunplay is based on the foundation built in the previous game. Recoil is strong but not obnoxious with random element that creates inaccuracy when firing at longer ranges. Guns are extremely lethal, most killing in just two shots and sound very good for the major part. Sadly there are couple of things that was changed from previous game for bad.

The first one was actually fixed early in the game's life. The weapons used to have a lot of idle sway when staying in ADS. This used to throw a lot of your shots off even when playing aggressively although, the feature seemed like it was supposed to weaken campers. To make matters worse sway had a random trajectory. Nowadays, sway is much weaker and have a predictable trajectory of a closed curve. Props to NWI for listening to feedback.

Another one is increased first shot recoil. Insurgency Standalone had no such thing but recoil overall was a bit stronger. Sandstorm on the other hand, have a significantly increased recoil of the first shot and seems to have reduced recoil of the later shots. According to the game's logic, when weapon is set to semi-auto every shot is the first shot so, every shot will have an increased recoil. This significantly complicates shooting visually small targets. As I mentioned above, recoil has random element which creates inaccuracy when shooting in full-auto. In most cases full-auto is perfectly sufficient but, sometimes I feel the need to fire a string of individual shots to reliably take out enemy obstructed by cover, sniper holed deep within building or just a distant target but, due to first shot recoil full-auto remains a better option despite being roll of dice in such a situations.

Final problem is random recoil when firing without ADS. It's violent. The weapon randomly jumps from side to side making you randomly hose a huge cone in front of you instead of a target you try to point it at. When clearing rooms you have to either sacrifice situational awareness and mobility staying in ADS all the time, waste precious time entering ADS when seeing a target or pray to RNGesus to tame your weapon. With machine you have very long ADS enter time and have to rely on unreliable hip-fire to defend from enemies up-close. And with any pistol-caliber weapon this looks absolutely absurd.

**Aesthetics**
Sometimes the game has too much brown and orange. Characters wear plate-carriers to low so, vitals are not protected, backpacks are absolutely giant and Security forces wear lame ammo-carrying vest instead some tacticool chest rig (just my preference). Also, somewhere early in the game's life grenades and pistol chosen by player stopped appearing on the player's model perhaps for optimization reason but, this feature was restored in the mod called ISMC and doesn't seem to affect performance that much. Other than that, the game runs on UE4 and NWI use it damn well especially for indie devs to whom Unreal is notoriously harsh towards.

**Closing notes**
Sandstorm can be described as "two steps forward and one backwards". In many ways it's a better game than Insurgency Standalone but, it's core suffered from numerous unwanted changes.

(I'd give it a mixed rating if Steam allowed me to do so.)

**P.S.**
Flashbangs are severely underpowered and don't justify points you spend. For the same price you can get much more useful smoke grenade. I suggest giving two flashbangs per single point instead of one.

Search Project Rome if you want to play multiplayer. There are always a few populated servers in the evening EU time.

Weapon and perk balance is trash (9A-91, MG36, Magnum ammo) and one may realize why destruction was toned down in later games (it might have been fixed with addition of ability to fortify in Bf5, didn't play it honestly). Otherwise it aged very well and it's worth trying at least to accustom yourself with Battlefield series' history.

It is very different from later installments.

Shooting, due to internal game logic, requires a lot more of short bursts or even semi-auto then later games however, spraying is still viable at closer ranges. Distinction between main guns is a lot more prominent. AK is shot in semi a lot more than other guns, M4 w/ suppressor attached is easiest to spray and non-suppressed M4 is somewhere in-between.

Movement feels very different from later games as well. Pressing crouch for a brief moment makes you jump for a very small height which, allows you to peak over head level cover for info. Also, you can double-tap for even bigger effect or bind to mousewheel to be able to "bob" continuously as you move making yourself harder to headshot. Usual movement mechanics are different too thus, 1.6 is worth trying at least due to KZ, surf and bhop being unique experience.

Overall, recommended to anyone who played GO/Source/2 at least to familiarize yourself with Counter-Strike's history and, who knows, maybe you like it so much, it becomes your main.