Alf Tupper 最近的評論

Ok, my review says not recommended. Please read what I have to say, and make your own minds up. TLDR: this is an expensive game considering that it does not adequately feature some important aspects of warfare in this era: elevation, visibility, morale, artillery.

My background is tabletop war gamer since about 1981, plus I have a massive interest in the OVERLORD campaign, in particular the Commonwealth sector of the battle. Oh and ex TA bod too, so I have a rough idea of how things should go. I have almost exclusively played the Commonwealth campaign (which does feature Polish troops later on in the campaign, so forgive me for labelling it Commonwealth).

This game has several plus points:

- the developers communicate extremely well with their player base, especially on Discord. You can have one to one chats with them, and they do listen to the player base, even if they can't work miracles at short notice. This bodes well for the game's future.

- the size of the game is just big enough to give you control of up to a Company of infantry, plus some armoured and transport assets. This was quite often the size of game I played in 1/300 so feels good. It's based on hexes, about 25 metres to a hex, and the turns are probably about 15 seconds long. I could be wrong here, it's just a quick guess.

- the importance of infantry is spot on in this game; it's the bulk of your fighting force a lot of the time, and needs to be used correctly, with fire and movement once contact is made.

- the research into the units and their weapons seems pretty accurate; the lowest level of unit is either something like a 2 or 3 man weapons team, or a rifle section, or a gun group. I haven't spotted any tanks or weapons that I know didn't feature in this campaign. The models themselves are ok, you know what you're looking at, and the colours are all correct too.

- the basic play mechanism is YOUGOIGO, or turn based as we used to call it. It's very simple to pick up, and the interface is very good at helping you move your units cautiously, at full dash, or setting overwatch positions for ambushes or to cover vital ground. The mechanism does very well with the effect of movement on your firing, plus also accomodates issues such as turret turning speeds, and the relative immobility of casemated vehicles such as the StuG III. There is also an excellent suppression mechanism if fire is successful, where a unit can have its effectiveness reduced in 10% increments all the way from just 10% to a full 100% where a unit cannot then move or fire in the next turn.

- line of sight is very important in this game; there is a tool to let you check this artificially on the board. As I'll discuss in the negative sides to the game, I am not sure this is a good thing, and it can become a God eye tool, and lets you check things out that you would not have been able to do in real life. Maybe restricting it to hexes where you have your own units could be an option.

- I found it (at first) compelling to play, and with options set to maximum difficulty, it was a good test. You can ease off on the options to allow yourself an easier but less realistic game if you wish. There's no penalty for doing this, the main aim of the game is to enjoy the game.


So, having said all that, what do I think is missing or could be done better?

- there are minor quibbles with things like the PIAT appearing on the GUI as an AT Rocket. Rifle sections aren't a 3 man gun group and a 7 man rifle squad but are split 5 and 5 in the Commonwealth forces, and I think it's the same in the German side too.

- the maps and line of sight. There is no elevation in this game, nor will there be with this game engine. Obstructions to LOS come purely from buildings, walls, hedgerows, and orchards. The maps start to feel very formulaic, with spread out villages, and penny packeted German defenders dotted here and there.

- the missions; you can play as either side. But each mission is the same: capture the flags by having removed the Germans from each zone around a given flag. As Commonwealth, you're most usually attacking. I have played some scenarios as Germany to see how the game goes, and it's a lot easier, the AI does not deal well with organising an attack; more of the AI shortly.

- spotting; yes the game allows you to use some stealth and try and remain unseen, but I am not convinced by the mechanics of this. It seems if you remain still, you are virtually invisible until the enemy walks into your sights, but once you fire you will remain visible to everyone, albeit the game notes say you can revert to unseen eventually. The lack of terrain elevation makes the game somewhat stale.

- the AI (and morale). As noted above, the AI is poor in the attack. In defence, it is quite good, basically as it sits in ambush, automatically checks all possible lines of sight, and once it detects you, will run through every permutation of fire and movement to get its troops to maybe move a hex and fire at you. It's also fallible; you can sucker it into moving to fire at one of your units but at a very low % as it has turned/moved, then on your next turn, pull that unit back into cover, and expose a different unit on another part of the map, to be fired at again at a low %, and then the enemy tank will spend its time sat still while you manoeuvre your other units into a killing solution.

- morale. There isn't really any. You get a ration or morale points at the start of the game; infantry squads are usually 1 point, a tank and its crew are 3. Once you lose a number of units and you have no morale points left, you lose the game. You could be wiping the floor with the enemy, and about to capture your last flag, but the computer says no, and the game ends. It takes no account of any other factors. There is no individual unit morale; a rifle squad may get reduced to one man, but they will continue to function even if they are alone in a field facing 2 Panthers 50 metres away. On this basis, we also then miss out on various qualities of troops from do or die Waffen SS soldiers through to not very keen Osttruppen who would just love to surrender.

- off board assets. The Commonwealth armies of 1944 had massive artillery support on call. If we ignore air support and naval gunfire support, and just look at a typical Battalion in the attack, it would have 6 x 3" mortars organically, plus 25 Pdrs aplenty. This was a great equaliser in the real campaign, and if your infantry company is on point and leading an attack, it would be well supported by artillery.

- force matching and balance; the scenarios in the campaign are preset, but when I flicked over to play the German side, it was interesting to see that I might have 18 units to the Commonwealth's 22 or 24, 2 Marder 1s and a PaK40 to face 5 Shermans. An old tabletop wargame wouldn't make a defender so strong, and that's a good place to leave this review.

Yes, I am an old school wargamer; I am used to complex spotting, using the lie of the land, and morale rules. The shame is that PC gaming makes these so easy to implement in microseconds, compared to the old pencil and paper, tape measures, and dice rolling I was used to. Many of these aspects are absent or undermodelled. I end up gaming the game, sending out a scouting jeep on a YOLO dash to spot enemy units, and battling house by house through yet another village.

A bit too simple, not enough current content, and I don't like the control set up.

Graphics - ok but not up to ARMA III or War Thunder standards

OK, I'll keep this short.

I accept that for the price, you will get limited content. So you basically get US forces, German Heer and Waffen SS, but also French resistance - an odd extra but there you go. Yes, we know that British, Commonwealth and Polish troops also fought in Normandie, but you can't have it all. I hope if this DLC has good sales we will see an expansion DLC to cover the rest of the United Nations forces in this theatre.

Uniforms and small arms - it's pretty much all there, and accurately done too. A shame the Panzershreck isn't here though, and the StG44 was only in this campaign in very small numbers from what I know.

The terrain is well done - my parents lived in Normandie for over 25 years, so what I see in the game looks very realistic and typical of what the area looks like.

Downsides - as many others have noted - are the vehicles. No jeeps, K wagens, sidecars or motorbikes. The US seem to do ok, but the Germans are poorly done here:

- three models of the Panzer III which by this time was not a front line tank, and possibly only 30 were in use in Normandie in second line roles such as observation or signals tanks.
- Panzer IV G which is ok, but most Pz IVs in theatre were the Pz IV H I think
- the Pz VI H1 Tiger is nice but I think all Tigers in Normandie were the Tiger E, with different road wheels, and a different cupola
- the Nashorn: not used in this campaign at all as far as I know

So in terms of constructive feedback, I think most of us would have liked to see a StuG III or StuG IV instead of the three Pz IIIs and the Nashorn; a Pz IV H would have been just as easy to produce for the game, and the lack of a Panther seems a bit odd.

The other poor point is the lack of single player stuff - I'm not a great fan of MP servers, it would be good to see more love for the single player vs AI game in this DLC

A more complex version of Left For Dead I suppose, but nothing in this game I got for free attracts me; it might appeal to a 14 year old with the attention span of a wasp I suppose.

EDIT - February 2024 patch and more

Ok, I learnt to shoot in the military, and the only hunting I have done is with 12 ft lb air rifles in the UK. I was a long term Hunter Classic player, and started COTW when it was new. To me COTW was a lost opportunity to introduce aspects that Classic could not.
So, in WotH, what do you get?
Pretty graphics that run well on a mid range PC at highest settings, and audio effects that match. It is very immersive.
A good selection of rifles, shotguns, crossbows and bows, with scopes, callers and binos. You start with an effective .243 and a less effective 30/30 lever action, binos and a scope. The rest of the gear is buyable with money made form harvesting kills. There are three buyable for real money weapons packs, with four weapons in each pack. Basic ammo is free, but the game now offers two other ammo types per weapon payable with in game currency.

- proper range zeroing in 50m and 100m clicks instead of COTW's bizarre 75/150/300m cludge
- a full range of hints and aids that can be custom tuned to give you the game you want from EZ mode to hardcore
- no Huntermate as such making the game into an arcade game, it's all 'on screen'
- fascinating bullet cam once you harvest, much more intricate than COTW
- external and terminal ballistics much more realistic than COTW where the rifles have the trajectories of lasers and just punch a hole in the animal. The game has proper windage - your bullets drift with the wind strength and direction; this becomes very obvious when you start taking 600 metre shots!

Overall - I am enjoying this game so much more than COTW. Yes it is harder, but that makes it much more of a challenge. The developers seem keen to stay in touch with their players - their Discord channel seems to have a representative much of the time, answering questions and seeing what people feel about the game. To me, a lot of this is what COTW could have been, to get closer to simulation rather than emulation. I hope this game takes off, and they stay true to the theme of realism and simulation.*

You also get a free Jeep with free fuel as soon as you pass the tutorial. Other vehicles are available for in game money, plus there is a buyable for real money Kawasaki DLC.This is necessary as the reserves are vast - well the Rumanian one is, the Nez Percé one is just as big. You don't have to pay to unlock/build hunting towers - you just find them, then use them.

Things that would make this game a true hit:*

1. add independent head movement; the Hunter Classic had it, COTW ballsed up by removing it and dabbling with the Tobii system.
2. add support for TrackIR and Tobii. It's a pretty common thing in many FPS games and flight sims, it ads a lot of immersion instead of walking like a crab... and it did sort of work in the Hunter Classic. It might tempt anyone who went for Tobii just for COTW to defect.
3. have more than three caller slots (Aug 25 2022). You can carry two rifles, and two sets of binos, so one or two more caller slots isn't unrealistic.
4. start a weight based inventory mechanism so that weight does slow you down; a game where you can immediately carry two rifles with no penalties is silly.

Top tips -

1 - do the US map first, it has a series of easy missions to build up your money
2 - do missions to build up your cash, the best buy at the start is the long range scope
3 - travel the map in the jeep straight away to unlock campsites and lodges, and access extra missions
4 - you can buy the rights to private hunting areas, but you can also unlock them by doing tasks


Updated for October 2024

The game has seen some updates this year, with two new reserves set in New Zealand, and Finland. (There are two from 2023, set in Africa and Alaska).
We are at the stage now where most animals that are commonly hunted have been modelled in their various guises, ie many variations on deer/wolf/bear/badger/rabbit and goose/duck. There was no attempt to model Wallabies for Matariki Park, and the four follow up maps are only 8x8 km compared to the much bigger starter maps. There has been no suggestion that Turkeys are in the pipeline either.
We have seen two payable weapons pack DLCs, a payable outfit DLC, and a payable ATV pack plus two payable DLC reserves. We have also seen the introduction of three ammunition types for each weapon. It’s enough to keep me occupied with looking at the new stuff.

*So, what of improvements to the game, and its original authentic feel? None of my four desiderata have been brought into the game, and that is a shame. We saw the introduction of tripods, and you can carry 20 of them at once. They go up in 10 seconds, and can be remotely uninstalled by clicking on the map. They don’t spook nearby animals when you erect them. Realism has gone for a little wander down a dark dusty road.

The external ballistics haven’t continued to impress. There are a few cludges and approximations, the main issue is the buffing of certain cartridges hitting power, plus ballistic curves that seem too buffed as well.

The Finnish reserve has some dubious features. Arctic Foxes appear in their winter fur when it is clearly not winter. They are mediocre modifications of the Red Fox model, and use the same set of calls. You can hear Lynx footsteps over 200 metres away and determine gender by the sound of footsteps. (This applies to nearly all species). The Eurasian Elk is labelled as a Eurasian Moose; there is no such thing, it's Alces Alces Alces, and has been called an Elk or cognate names in Europe since well before Columbus got across the Atlantic. We've got calling rabbits who can be heard running around from 50 metres away or more. We've got pheasants when you'd expect grouse. The list could go on and on, but I think we have been shortchanged.


Finally, the developers haven’t taken advantage of another of this game’s unique selling points. Remember I said you could select one of five difficulty settings? Well you get no in game financial advantage whatsoever doing things the hard way. It would be relatively easy to develop a matrix that increased your rewards based on your difficulty settings.

Is this the best hunting game out there at the end of 2024? If you want to collect a massive amount of toys, tools and hitech gear, COTW is for you. If you want to focus more on a hunting simulation, despite its many flaws, TWOTH is the best game out there for me, but it has an accumulating set of issues that make me want to say the developers should improve their product.

Game play very linear and spoon fed. Much time spent watching cut scene videos. Clunky game play spoon fed plus very based on game controllers not keyboard/mouse... no head control that I can find.

Repeated crashes - maybe every hour or so - on a high spec PC means I don't recommend this classic to you. I'm not running any mods, so for a vanilla game to be so unstable isn't a good thing. The game was good in its day but there's nothing really new since it was released to make me even think about debugging it or trying to use DLC and mods - I have better things to do with my time. Refund applied for.

Edited July 2022

I think it's fair to say there is still a feel of early access to this sim. Look carefully before you buy.

Here are its plus points for me: the graphics are very high end and in 4k my rig will get about 25fps on ultra settings. By comparison I can run IL2 Battle of Stalingrad on max settings and 60fps. So the visual experience is very good indeed. However with reflection, I think this indicates poor graphics optimisation as I get a hot graphics card comapred to any other game I play.

Generally the ground seems almost real, and the lighting effects at dusk are splendid. But the rendering of steep ground ie cliffs is below average, and things like no tide on beaches is a bit of a miss too.

I like the options for live weather and live MP interaction, and overall the user interface to set a flight up is intuitive and easy to perform.

I like the in flight menu system where you can tweak things easily without totally exiting the flight.

Other aspects that are fine are the choice of planes, and generally, it's easy to pick this up and fly .

So what isn't so good?

Landscape wise, rivers are too wide and too blue, they can be seen in a way that's not realistic. The auto Building generation could do with a bit of user tuning being made available - I am seeing east German blocks of flats appearing in the place of British castles and churches, and tower blocks in the middle of a remote village.

The biggest pain though - control set up. I use a Logitech G940 and there are two issues. Only a certain number of flight sticks are supported, which I can understand, but if your device is not on the list, it's manual set up time, and this isn't as easy as it is on games such as Rise of Flight or Battle of Stalingrad. It took me a bit too much time to work out how to programme an axis or a button - what this needs is a control wizard a bit like Warthunder to help you programme your device to the game.

The only other issue (which I think is on the list of things to be fixed) is about controller sensitiivity; I don't think it's really a game that supports force feedback sticks, and the in game sensitivity tuning is not good either - you can't customise per plane so the settings you use for the Pitt stunt plane are the as for the 747.

Overall - I'd suggest wait three months for a bit of the postrelease debugging to happen and watch for a sale, don't go for the bigger packs, just the basic sim,. as I don't think you get value for money with all the extras.

I think this will be the defining flight sim for the next few years once the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ get sorted, and creators add planes scenery and so on like they did in previous versions of this series.

Chocks away!

Additional:

1 - the game does not autoupdate on Steam - you have to run the game then upload new files. Therefore it's a frequent occurrence to decide to play, then spend a while waiting for updates to download. This is a poor way of doing things.

2 - the game does not like having its files moved from drive to drive, and if you verify game files in Steam, it's basically a fresh install. This is a poor way of doing things.

3 - to get my G940 working I have used a paid add on, XPForce for Flight Simulator. I shouldn't really have to do this

4 - to try and get trees that are in the right place and of the right size, I have again had to buy an add on (Bijan) as the vanilla game randomly dots trees in places trees don't grow.

5 - I still occasionally get freezes and CTDs; as I am using official add ons from the game's store, it's somewhat odd to then be told by the game to run in safe mode in case mods are causing instability. Don't sell mods that cause instability then?

6 - I am still not happy with the fps issues; my card runs hot compared to comparable programmes such as DCS or IL2

So, changing to not recommended now.... there's been enough time for MS to look at some of these issues and solve them.

Sept 2022 - I now get an error message and the game shuts down if I use EVGA Precision to set my FPS; the message says my graphics card has had an error, might be overclocked or overheated.... none of which are true. What a load of dingo's kidneys.

UPDATE with the B129 unstable release, the game is getting better, and the developers have released a series of hotfixes based on community feedback. This in itself is a good thing, as the game is alive and kicking, and the community is on the whole constructive and pretty well informed on how u-boots worked and fought historically so it's a good combination.

I've gone back to SH V to see what that's like and UBOAT is slowly catching up with SH V and I am hoping will overhaul it in the next 12 months.

At the time of writing, UBOAT still lacks certain reality aspects - eg your hydrophone plots on the game map show all the ships, direction, etc, so you can make torpedo launched from below periscope depth based on hydrophone data alone. However the crew management, damage control and manual torpedo attack systems are great.

There's no TDC as per SH III or SH IV to mess with, but if you like mods, there is an active modding community that has bling like this to add to your vanilla game.

Overall - if you like the experience of beta testing games, I'd say this is now worth buying!

Sakhal update Nov 2024. Review of my review!! TLDR - Sakhal isn't a great addition, and it may not be worth your £$ money.

Updated late November 2024 as I have played the Sakhal DLC a lot, and feel like I have probably had enough of it now. Here are the criticisms of Sakhal and the other changes that came with version 1.26.

1 - the cold mechanism. It's unrealistic, and essentially you are going to be lighting fires a lot to stay alive. Even the best insulated clothing does not keep you warm for long. Eating warm food and drinking warm liquids does not maintain or increase your temperature beyond the baseline. Putting warm or hot items in your inventory is the same. The only way to get one, two or three + marks next to your temperature is to sit by a fire. There is no wind chill. If you heat a stove and a room up, it's stone cold and then freezing as the fire goes out. However - sit in a car with an engine running - you'll stay warm all day, even if the car has no doors! It's almost the same with the boat- sit in it and get it running, and most of the time your temperature will stay constant or occasionally increase. This is an open RIB in the subantarctic.... I wish the real things kept you as warm. Basically it's a very poorly executed mechanism.

2 - the boat. No cargo capacity at all. Nil. Zero. Sweet FA. You can't drop a rucksack on the floor and motor off, the rucksack stays where you places it on the shore. Easily stolen as all you need is a spark plug and maybe a water bottle of fuel. Can't be camouflaged or otherwise dragged up a beach and hidden. There is no way to row or paddle them. I also have a feeling they despawn if not used.

3 - snow. You can put it into a pot, the filter bottle, or a bottle and it melts straight away. Unless you filter it, you get heavy metal poisoning, but you can cook all your food in melted snow with no issues at all. I wonder if the devs have ever tried to melt snow for water? It's painfully slow to do, and quite energy thirsty. The real life solution is to look for chunks of ice. There's none of this in game - scoop the water into your pot, and bingo it turns into water. After all the unreal fire lighting you need to do to stay warm, this goes to the other end of the scale of unrealism. Oh and you can't use salt water for cooking either.

4 - wolves. No matter how many of them you kill in a wolf spawn area, they keep coming back. Their flesh now has a chance of giving you salmonella even when cooked (60% i think). You can only escape them by getting in a building or on a car, or by spawning out quickly. There are also wolves that approach you silently and bite your bum, then you really are in trouble if you are solo, and don't have a decent firearm or access to a building. Can you climb one of the millions of trees to escape them? No you can't, the game won't let you. Why is this an issue - because a lot of areas on Sakhal away from the coast are wolf infested, and it's been the biggest cause of deaths in my playtime.

5 - this isn't just Sakhal, it's the overall game. You can log out and respawn on any of the three maps on the Official branch. Why is this an issue? Well on Sakhal there are some locations that are loot spawn gold mines - the military containers that wash up on the islands. Farm away, and you'll have M4s, AK 101s, plate carriers, pouches, and the ammo and magazines to fight a small war. Want warm gear to survive on Sakhal? Play Livonia or Cherno as no one seems to want balaclavas, ushankas or white hunter clothes there; lighters and matches aren't priority items, so a lot of loot that is vital on Sakhal is left lying around on the two other maps.

Overall - I am taking my team off Sakhal to play somewhere warmer. If the devs had put more effort into the body heat mechanism to keep it semi-realistic I could have carried on, but they didn't.

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The new DLC brings several new challenges to the game, and has got me hooked again. The big changes for me are that you now will spend a lot more time fighting the environment, and less time worrying about high tier looting.

The DLC uses a crude heat loss mechanic that requires you to build fires for warmth, and on a regular basis. As well as your drink and food stats dropping more quickly, if you get hypothermic you lose health. Which is fair enough, but even with the best clothing on for insulation, with a load of hot food inside you, you still lose body heat far too quickly when jogging or sprinting.

The map has the top tier loot on a peninsula reached by a vary narrow isthmus, so I would imagine quite tricky to get there on a busy server. You could look for a boat, but... you can't put cargo in a boat, you can only take with you what you can carry. That's rather poor isn't it?

There is a side game, finding keys to a briefcase found on a body on the volcano, which will give you a couple of Gucci items, and a glow plug to let you access the locked bunker in the Tier 4 area. Again, like the bunker in Livonia, it'll be a popular place for ambushes. At least you can try this side game single handed if you really want to.

The game generally is very good. The player base is on the other hand toxic, and full of kill on sight idiots who would shoot you even when you are cooking them some hot food. Not recommended unless you are a juvenile psychopath with behavioural issues.

And hackers still seem to out there, but not as much on Sakhal. Middle of nowhere, doing nothing, low pop server, and you get sniped from behind. I would avoid the official servers and play on a whitelisted community server with active admin.