Recent reviews by FMB

Memories. I played this (well, the original non-gold version) on the C64 back in the late 80s. I played this on my first PCs in the 90s. It is high up on every list of "fav games of all time" I ever made.
Other people, when you show them a map of the Caribbean, they think "holidays" or "fruity cocktails". Me, I am reminded of a brown-greenish parchment map that came with the C64 version of THIS game..

So buy this for a trip down memory lane.
However, don't buy this, if you've never played this before, because even though it is an absolutely fantastic game in terms of concept and execution, you will not like the way it looks and handles (also, the DOSBOX emultor may require some fiddling before the game runs properly on modern hardware).
By modern standards, this is likely to be frustrating. By my standards, it's one of the most gloriously delicious experiences to be had in front of a screen.

Don't buy this. I say this with a heavy heart, because the game used to be fun. It had enormous potential as a new take on MOBAs. I used to really believe that. I even still believed it could be resurrected despite a rapidly dwindling player base and veterans fleeing the game left and right over the last years. I'm a sucker for a good redemption story.

Alas, despite the incredibly long time they took to develop their new matchmaking (codename "Galactron" - game version 3.3), which many of us remaining players thought might turn this ship around, I am now forced to conclude that devs did not manage to fix the problems at the core of this game. In fact, as of right now, it's worse than ever.

So, to put all this in context, let the nice uncle tell you a story about how things were a while ago. Specifically, what matchmaking used to be like.
Basically, it was "first come first served" with very limited regard to how experienced ("skilled") players really are and where they come from ("ping"). Thus it was entirely possible to get matched with/against players from across the globe (literally), or players who had picked up the game barely a week before. This is not hyperbole. This happened way too often for it to be coincidence. I have played this game for close to 3000 hours over the last couple of years (smurf accounts included), so believe me, I've been around the block. It means something when I say: the number of unbearable matches with either extreme latency or extreme inexperience was beyond counting.
And it gets better: the devs directly and intentionally caused this situation, as regards high latency. There is/was a setting that let you decide WHERE your game client would look for a match. In other words, you could specify the maximum "distance" (=~ping) that would be acceptable for your matchmaking. Sounds great, no? It would be. Except, devs felt it would be unfair to actually enforce this setting. Unfair to all the people from remote areas of our planet, who would then have a more difficult time getting matches. So they came up with a truly unique solution: The setting only goverend YOUR client. If you set it up to be looking for matches as low ping as possible, that's what YOUR client did. But that didn't prevent OTHER players from setting THEIR clients to "worldwide" and thus join after you, for example. And of course, predictably, that is exactly what happened once out of every, I dont know, 5? 10? matches. Way too much. Did I mention, that the matchmaking ALSO didnt really care too much what rank/rating players had? Sure, it "tried" to get you a somewhat close match, but in reality that meant "no more than 2 leagues apart". A league is HUGE. To consider players 2 leagues apart is frankly a joke. And again, this is exactly what did happen.

The old matchmaking had one advantage however. It ran entirely through STEAM. And Steam has a "block all communications with user" feature. After a while, Awesomenauts players figured out that using this would also keep players from getting into one's matches. So that's what we did. My blocklist grew to several thousand people from thousands of miles away. It was the only way to keep matches relatively free from 200+ ping.

This worked alright for a while. But the game had other issues (esp. balancing), or not everybody knew about the blocking, or indeed wanted to make use of this "trick", resulting in more and more players becoming fed up with the game. Veterans quit. The game's population got thinner. Matches got worse. It was stomp after stomp after stomp then, and has been for the last year or so. But, at least you could block laggers and terrible players.

That is, until now.
The latest version - "Galactron", version 3.3 - finally introduced the supposed panacea for this game, the fix that would finally take care of imbalanced skill-matchmaking and horrible pings. Or so we were promised. It was in development for, I dont know, a year or so. It was finally released a few days ago. But already during the preceding public betas it became clear that devs could/would not deliver on their promises. Neither skill-based matchmaking nor ping-based matchmaking has improved for me. I have had to play with inexperienced teammates and against 300ms-players.

The difference to before being that they can't be blocked anymore.

But hey, as long as devs can develop a new DLC-skin, right? That's one final thing I'd like to mention: Devs of this game have a huge hard-on for graphics. If they put half as much effort into tracking down bugs, fixing matchmaking or getting the game properly balanced, as they put into making new skins and improving visuals, this game could have been a huge hit on the scale of LoL.

Based on my considerable experience with this game, I can only regretfully recommend you do NOT buy this. Not even at a reduced price.

I for one will keep checking in every now and again, to see if the situation is getting any better, but Im sad to say, it looks like this "final bullet" is a complete dud and my hopes are very low indeed at this point. To say I'm disappointed would be an understatement of some proportion.