Recent reviews by ShadowDoctrine

Good game, I don't really like single player games but this one is beautiful, runs well (admittedly, had to upgrade my PC a little first) I don't care much for the story but the environment is so well done in this with the animals and changes in weather, it doesn't really matter what you're doing it's good fun.. i usually play a few hours at a time, i might do a couple of missions here and there in single player or online, but mostly i just roam around the map hunting stuff and enjoying the open world content. Just now after nearly 30 hours I noticed lightning strike a rock in the near-distance with a magnificent light show, sparks flew up in the air and i stopped what i was doing just to watch the environment do it's thing lol.. I play mostly in first person and they've done well to make things just as immersive and fun in first person as it is in 3rd person.. movement is sometimes bit more chaotic than 3rd person, but it's mostly fine.

Anyway, 100% recommend it - the only negative thing I can think of right now is the hackers aka modders.. a few minutes before this review my game crashed to desktop from an online session with some weird error and after googling it, turns out it's directly related to someone using a mod-menu to force a theme on their camp that isn't accessible to anyone else as it's been removed from public access apparently but still within the game code. So because this one person enabled a previously disabled theme, I and probably everyone else in the server crashed..

While it is extremely irritating it isn't all the time and your online game play encounters will vary from the friendly mind-their-own-business types of people that say hi as they ride on past you to the super toxic-lasso-hogtie-and-murder-you types that scream profanity because they're inbred yokels immersing themselves in outlaw behaviour.. Each can be equally fun to interact with but the other types are just weak minded losers, their only purpose is to ruin your day but not with murdering or tying you up, or even screaming all the words their parents forbid them to say elsewhere but by spawning bears all around you constantly, fixating on you if you call them out for needing to touch grass, they'll teleport behind you and kill you repeatedly, where ever you spawn because they are the highschool shooters that never had the courage to follow their dreams. The cowards of RDR2 Online. The Modders..

Jokes aside, the game is great, covers all bases for single player and multiplayer, missions have a bit of variety too it's just an overall good experience. Despite the modders I prefer online play, just because I get bored and most of the time you'll get a decent bunch of people to play with... I mean some modders are even decent, it's not a blanket statement that they're all bad.. Some of them are fun and enhance the experience, but most will annoy the crap out of you..

Had it in my library for many years, was put off by everyone saying I needed to invest in a proper stick and throttle setup recently got a Razer Wolverine V2 and set it up for War Thunder and it was alright, but I'm not really into WT so I thought I'd give it a chance in DCS and it's amazing, lol. After going through the training with the SU-25T that you get with the base DCS I managed to fly around but as I don't speak or read Russian all the instruments and warning sounds were beyond me but I could take off and land at least.. So anyway I went on to get the A-10C II because it was on sale recently and as an American aircraft I can understand the cockpit much better..

I've only put about 14hrs into the game so far since purchasing the A-10C II so the total 16hrs right now is me not even finishing the training, I've not yet learned to use countermeasures or the air to air stuff but I can safely say it's well worth it and 100% doable with a gamepad if you have no stick. I come to DCS from an Arma 3 background so I'm used to having to use a lot of modifier buttons to achieve things, It's all muscle memory at the end of the day and once you learn the button combos and get used to the controller you can fly and adjust the MFCDs on the go, perhaps in a combat situation the joystick would make things easier but for now while I'm learning to use the aircraft it's perfectly fine.. If you just want to fly around and enjoy the game a gamepad works just as well as a full HOTAS setup.. though as I said, the stick will probably make it easier not having to do a combo of buttons to achieve the same results lol.

First and foremost I've read a lot of the reviews today and noticed a lot of people stating it's a tech demo and the map is small and sure, they are technically right; but that's what you're buying into. Those same people probably neglected to read anything about the product they're complaining about. The whole point of Reforger is to iron out the bugs in the new engine to pave way for development of Arma 4.

To put it simply, Reforger is something you buy if you care about the future of Arma. All your feedback in this temporary installation of the Arma series will be forwarded onto Arma 4 as that is it's sole purpose. Bohemia's already stated this product will only receive 12 months of support after it's released, then all focus will be on the main Arma 4 development.

If you love Arma 3 and want to help create a better Arma 4, jump into this game and join us. As with all EA titles there are bugs and as with every Arma Alpha test there are server issues, I remember the rough transition from A2 to A3 Alpha we had similar issues with desync and server disconnects and that was on an engine that was time-tested as the previous two titles were made on the same real virtuality engine just updated each time. Reforger is built upon a whole new engine, which had it's debut in DayZ but I believe this one is a modified version of that one.

Anyway, the game itself is great, I think people are just too reliant on the GPS and blufor tracking in Arma 3, they didn't have the whole experience some of us had in A1 and A2 where you had limited tech at your disposal and had to actually use your brain to navigate most of the time, learning how to read a map was essential as it is today in this one. Back in 2001 Arma: Cold War Crisis was set in 1985 and Reforger places you on the same map 4 years later in 1989. Reforger's map is literally a remake of their original game map in Operation Flashpoint back in 2001. Some of us are still around from those days and I'd bet money that those rating this negatively weren't even born back when we started playing ArmA/OFP lol.

Aside from the bugs and server issues (that have mostly been fixed now I might add), the game is beautiful. The lighting and shadows are amazing, it doesn't suffer from poor FPS like A3 Alpha did. It has a maximum view distance of 5Km currently, which is more than enough for the small island you're on. When you enter a vehicle you see your hands physically open the door and sit your person in the seat, to drive you need to look at the ignition and interact with it before you can drive anywhere, you see the dude change gears on the stick as you're driving along, it's just a really nice experience for Arma. We've enjoyed high realism in the series for over 20 years now but now when you're looking at your map, others can see you physically holding up a map, or compass or flashlight. Everything is on your person now. If you don't have it on you, you can't use it or see it. There's no blufor tracking either, as mentioned earlier you don't see yourself on the map nor do you see others. The only assistance you get is a little insertion marker when you spawn in letting you know where you last spawned so you can try to figure out how to get where you need to be from there.

I very much enjoy that Reforger has gone back to the Arma roots with realism in mind, it's not supposed to be an easy game that holds your hand constantly, not everyone deserves a participation medal in Arma that's why we have Officer roles implemented there's supposed to be some form of leadership in play at all times even if you're a casual player or not inclined to lead other people, it's not a game designed around solo play it's supposed to be a team effort regardless of the difficulty.

Speaking of teams, the built in radio systems are pretty neat too, those of you that played A3 modded with TFAR and ACRE2 no longer require teamspeak as Reforger's got you covered. Each team has it's own communications network - Long Range radios replace your backpack and double as a mobile respawn beacon type of deal, while the short range can be carried within your uniform, the radios are 1989 quality too there are no satellites bouncing relays back here. Everon is a mountainous terrain and those mountains will wreck your comms even if you're only 1km from your receiver you need to get to high ground to transmit otherwise whatever you say will be incoherent or patchy at best.

Overall with it's new engine and graphics and all the current features, and knowing whats on the roadmap to come I feel it's a good time to start getting into Reforger if you're on the fence, if you have the recommended hardware requirements you will be fine.

In my own opinion I think most negative comments relating performance are because people have crappy systems to be totally honest. I feel a lot of these issues people whinge about with 'high end GPUs' could potentially be bottleneck issues on their end, as the game itself even when it was disconnecting constantly and servers were dying every 30min I've had great FPS and smooth gameplay (between the desync and crashes lol) since the first time I installed it.

For reference I don't have a NASA super computer or anything either, I have an i5-9600KF, RTX 2070 Super, 32Gb Ram and it's installed on a NVMe.2 Evo 970. Even during heavy rain or fog in an urban or forest environment having a firefight with the other team rarely drops my frames down below 70fps with everything maxed except motion blur.. Admittedly, on a 1440P monitor capable of pushing at least double that I get around the same performance/ FPS playing Star Citizen, which again has a ton of people crying about bad performance on high end systems, yet I still have no performance issues because I built this system based on compatibility, not based on what's newest or most expensive.

Just sayin' - TL;DR ignore negative reviews from the entitled zoomers that don't appreciate the series - buy Reforger on sale if you can't justify whatever it costs for you, as an Australian it's $40 here so if you're American and crying about the price.. Ehh you should probably wait til Arma 4 comes along.. with inflation and the number of years it'll take to come out.. You might wanna consider Reforger while it's still in EA pricing though lol.

Good fun, tutorial was lengthy but informative and as an avid sub sim fan it's a nice change to have a surface ship to command, gameplay is quite similar to the silent hunter series which i appreciated immensely, made picking up the navigation between stations easier to get used to i think. Straight out of the tutorial i sucked lost my convoy and eventually crashed into another escort but second time around i managed to sink my target and even with a lot of the stations set to automatic it still gives you that satisfaction of getting your first uboat kill.. I mean even with the sonar and radar stuff done for you; there's still a lot of trial and error when it comes to hitting a sub with depth charges as they don't just sit there and wait for you to kill them they are actively evading giving you the whole cat and mouse feel as you're needing to adapt your speeds and course changes trying to guess which direction they're going to head next as you have to drop the charges ahead of them.. if you're into sub sims and love evading destroyers as much as I do, you'll enjoy trying to trap the uboats with your surface vessels just the same, as the lead destroyer you have limited control over other escort ships in your convoy as well as aircraft sometimes. If you miss your mark and have to catch up with the convoy after losing the uboat you can extend your search area using one of your subordinate vessels or utilise the aircraft search.. Great game, limited content as expected in Early Access but so much potential.. Already have it listed in my favourites, can't wait to see what the devs bring in future updates :)

I bought this a while ago (atleast a couple years back by now when it first arrived on steam I think) but came back to see why it has mostly negative reviews, it's worth it if you're literate and can read the f*cking description..

"This content can only be accessed with EVE Online accounts created through Steam. Existing EVE Online accounts not created through Steam cannot benefit from it."

Also the in-game / website store purchases are better value but for convenience I prefer steam purchases regardless. Don't be fooled by the illiterate trash that don't bother reading what they're purchasing; it's not CCP or Steam's fault their parents didn't care for them enough to educate them better. Illiteracy is a global problem, stupidity is also a pandemic in our current world. Unfortunately there is no vaccine for this one though. Not yet atleast. CCP I implore you to create IQ injectors in your future patches these poor, poor people have suffered long enough!

Absolutely recommend it. It's great fun.. like a MMO mixed with MOBA type of thing.. with the added complexity of a resource manager + 4X type of research tree. I ignored it when I first saw it on steam thought it was going to be crap but I ran out of stuff to play and gave it a chance and it's actually really fun lol.. Having a great time with the longbow and dual blades - apparently both weapons are hated and I enjoy ruining people's day with them, sniping people long range and ambushing from stealth at close range, equally fun. Lots of stuff on the web about longbow being nerfed into the ground, but if you play it in a more defensive position it's not bad or anything I mean even if the whole enemy team shifts focus to you, it takes pressure off your team for a moment I've won most of my battles just being irritating enough to make 3 of 5 opponents target me as I run around the battlefield taking them away from the objectives.. I think all the people saying the longbow is bad are just not good at adapting to the situation they put themselves into.. it's a team effort at the end of the game. If you can't get kills, be the decoy for the people that can ;)

10/10 awesome game.

2023 edit: the developers have just done a major performance 'upgrade' the latency for every server has gone up by atleast 300ms for me in Australia, all the 'Asia' servers are beyond 500ms and the lowest ping that's playable for me is the middle east ~180ms I've not noticed any FPS increases with this latest update, but sure have noticed the connection downgrade.. this was supposed to just be a graphics improvement but has significantly degraded the ability to do almost anything now..despite the fun it used to have i can't recommend it anymore.. i'm on the edge of uninstalling it if the latency doesn't go back to what it used to be.. i.e the server i used to play on was around 130ms before and is now averaging 480-520ms :/

It's a good game, it's not what people wanted, but it's what we got. As an older gamer, I've been playing this series since it's inception in BF1942 and it's had it's ups and downs throughout. We currently live in an era where it's acceptable for people to complain because they believe they are entitled to something better and that they are the ultimate opinion of all things because in their silly little narcissistic brains, they actually are the epitome of perfection in this world.

The reality is; most of the negative reviews are by people that are influenced by others on their chosen platform whether it's Twitch or YouTube or something else. They all have this group-minded mentality, it used to be a thing of science-fiction where aliens were all connected on a type of neural network where everyone had a shared thought process, if you've played Stellaris, think of the Gestalt Intelligence, that's another name for group-minded.

So anyway, this new generation of stupid with their constant access to social media, constant influences in the past 10-15 years have all been subjected to misinformation, disinformation, media hype etc.. Basically they don't seem capable of forming individual opinion anymore and have a favourite 'influencer' they idolise, said influencer voices an opinion sometimes controversially as their streams are also their income so it's clever marketing for them, but these people idolising every word become believers and spread the influence on their own social media accounts and to their own stupid followers and continue the cycle of stupidity.

Battlefield has never been a serious game to me I've played them all except Battlefield 3, I've enjoyed them all except Hardline the cops and robbers thing wasn't my favourite. I was hoping 2042 would be more like BF 2142, another title where public opinion was clearly divided it was a love-hate relationship among the BF community to say the least lol.. It was fun though and that's where BF excels.. being fun, not serious, sporting combined arms gameplay with large maps to cater for all types of players. 2042 has the largest maps ever and people complain, has amazing graphics, people complain, largest server capacity, people complain. I have an i5-9600KF, 32Gb Ram, RTX 2070 Super and don't have any performance issues in 2042, besides slow internet because of my amazing ADSL2+ line 3,800m from our exchange, so I get the connection issues a bit, but that's understandable with crap internet.. The game itself when it does connect plays beautifully, fps is only limited by my monitors 75Hz but I lock it to 60 anyway.

The launch was crap, true, but so were some of the other titles in the series. I bought the ultimate edition, in Australia that was $140 AUD. I've seen a few people comment about the lack of content, comparing it to BF3 or BF4.. BF4 released with the same hype this had but nobody seems to remember how horrible that was ( https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-06-19-ea-addresses-unacceptable-battlefield-4-launch ) probably because the majority of negative reviewers weren't even in high-school yet they're just repeating what they read or see because that's how stupid works, stupidity is it's own pandemic and it's been around far longer than Covid-19. There's no vaccine for it either, we used to have natural selection that would weed out the stupid in society but now the world is about political correctness everyone deserves a trophy just for existing and it's okay to complain about everything.

Is it worth $140 AUD, not really, but the game's not broken either, it's people that are broken you don't need a scoreboard to reinforce your narcissistic personality disorders. A server browser would be nice, but it doesn't take away from the gameplay just because it's missing.. Bunch of spastics whinging about every little thing. lol.

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Yes 100% recommend, it's free.. so you know totally worth the price.. but it's good fun too. Diplomacy is 60-75% of this game I'd say, there's the whole conquer the world with your military aspect, but sometimes your words are more powerful than your weapons here. For example, if you're a manipulative mofo you can use your jedi mind tricks to cut deals with people and sacrifice your allies to ensure your own survival, I'm only in my first 2 weeks playing but already secured my own country's survival in multiple games by inviting my would-be-invaders to use my infrastructure in order to gain access to my bordering nation's back door that they assume is secure and have no defences ready. I've even ended up in the top 5 on the scoreboard in a couple of them because I use my words more than my military lol. Do I trust the people I invited into my land? no; not at all but I've survived.. that's the main thing here isn't it?

The game is good fun for a lot of the usual reasons, but there aren't many games around where you can use diplomacy as a tool and intercept messages other people are sending with your intelligence networks then use what you know against them. On the outside it's a world domination army vs army thing but you can play politics to a pretty deep level if you use your words right too ;)
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Update: 2,146 hours later in 2025. The game is still everything I mentioned in 2021 though instead of occasionally coming across someone using gold to gain an advantage over the free to play accounts, it's more like every game or at least every second game you play and it's not just a little bit of an advantage. Every game I played in the past 4 months had a person blatantly abusing the gold advantage. I built up an alliance over the past 3-4 years taught multiple people how to play the game, how to win without dipping into their wallet but I've had enough of the wallet warriors. It's no longer fun even with 4 other alliance members in a match backing me up, when someone can simply buy everything and be capable of winning a 1v5 situation simply because they have overwhelming numbers of units. Not because they're using the units properly or skillfully.. They just simply bought them because they could afford to the game is no longer competitive in the public lobbies.

Consider there are 64 players on a standard WW3 map multiple coalitions spending at minimum 30+ days (real-time) strategically taking land to block other teams during a 'cold war' phase building up friendships to work with each other against another coalition temporarily, even though there can only be one coalition as the winner..

Then one dude spends $500-$1000 because he can afford it and wipes out 2 coalitions with ICBMs (5 players per coalition) because he paid to fast track his nuclear research instantly (takes just over 24hrs for a free account to research nuclear warheads) then he builds a level 5 weapons lab instantly because he can afford that too each level taking about 24hrs or so for the rest of us, that's 5 days minimum for a free player and that's only if they have the resources available for construction a lot of the time you're still building up other cities and mobilising more units in the process so let's say 5 days of real time invested that this one person can build instantly with gold. Then there's the mobilisation of the ICBM launcher itself, another 30hrs for most people but not if you're a paying customer, you can get those instantly too. Then there's the warhead production, each cycle for nuclear warheads produces 2x warheads, for an ICBM you need minimum 4x warheads per ICBM, it takes the unit around 12-16hrs to reload which cant be sped up with gold fortunately.. but it doesn't matter if you just pump out a bunch of ICBMs launchers, you dont need to wait for the reload time if you mass produce them.

This is what happened in my last game before i uninstalled it. I wasn't even a victim of the nuclear attack, I was just doing my thing with my alliance on the other side of the map chatting with the guy that was being beaten conventionally.. he was asking for help as it was his second game and my group were getting ready to do a full scale invasion on Europe from South America when the guy messaged me and said not to worry about it.. An hour later Europe was smoking crater from UK to Ukraine was smoking and 3/4 of the cities had little orange skulls (indicating WMD use) in the newspaper (incident reports) there was a notification that Turkey started researching nuclear tech, a moment later a report that Turkey had finished researching and was now a nuclear power and about 15-20min after that a whole page of ICBM impact reports.

If you wanted to do this as a free account without spending money, aside from the material costs (supply, components, electronics, rare materials & manpower) with just the time investment alone, you're going to need a week minimum for the research and construction efforts. Then as mentioned, having to mobilise the launcher itself is going to take a little over 24hrs per launcher, but you can make it at any city with a level 5 weapons lab. So lets say you've got 5x cities with level 5 weapons labs, you're making 5x ICBM launchers.. to fire 1 missile each, they are going to require 20 nuclear warheads, right? So next thing you need to do is produce 2x warheads per cycle takes around 16hrs to produce, so that's another day or two, just for enough warheads to fire each launcher one time... BUT if you're happy to spend money, you can speed through that process in seconds. The whole process really, can be fast tracked from weeks into minutes with enough gold. To clarify, this isn't an argument for using gold. Just an informative review of what can potentially happen at any time in your game. Most of the games you play are relatively fair but there is also always the threat of getting obliterated by someone with deep pockets that are willing to invest hundreds of dollars, just to get an advantage over you.

Despite it's insanely rough launch full of bugs and crappy devs WW3 is under new management now and all seems to be good, just need more people playing it. It's potentially the Battlefield 6 people want, boasting a post-modern to present day theme, full customisation, cosmetic unlocks, has a call of duty style perk system you can call off-map supports or little toys to enhance your game-play and battlefield style conquest type objectives. I'm just afraid that the good changes and bug fixes are too late to the abandonment party, as an Alpha tester even I was hesitant to reinstall it but after seeing a few YouTube videos lately I thought eh why not check it out, beats spending money on a new game.. and it's good so far.

I mean there are literally only a handful of players though which really makes it difficult to review as my first play after reinstalling there was only 1 server with 8 people playing and steam charts says there's a 24hr peak of 32 people lol, barely enough to fill one server.

Saying that though is why I decided to review it, if you're on the fence and reading all the negative reviews they're probably referring to it's initial launch issues. game breaking bugs, lack of server availability etc as an Aussie we had severely limited options where to play but we had a decent number of people willing to play, just couldn't get a server close enough to provide good pings. Today I see there are multiple Australian servers, multiple Asian servers, European, north american etc the new team developing has the infrastructure to support the whole world but people have given up on it.. at launch there were over 10,000 players wanting to get into it but couldn't, a month later down to 3,000 or so and the population died off in the following months.. If people would just give it another chance I think it could revive WW3. There's no pay wall or anything like EA games, all the unlocks are bought with whatever the green thing is called that you earn through game-play (lol clearly I didn't look into it much).

If you're looking for a reason to reinstall it, do it.. If you want a BF6/Call of Duty style shooter, get this instead and avoid all the EA crap.. The game itself is still Early Access while they continue to add to it, but right now it's 1000x better than when it launched, it legit just needs to fill it's servers with players and it'll be good to compete with the other titles that you all throw your wallets at lol..

Good fun, played a lot of Door Kickers I like the SWAT theme better to be totally honest as I worked in Private Security for a number of years I can relate better to the LEO situations, but Door Kickers 2 is pretty cool too. Giving it a military theme with support gunners and grenadiers adds some more toys to play with and you don't have to worry so much about non-lethal methods as it's a military situation rather than civilian. Makes for some more interesting tactics like my favourite, using the wall breach to splatter a bunch of scumbags at once as it covers a large lethal area and stuns any outside the lethal zone lol.. Explosives are fun, what can I say?.. Anyway, totally recommend it. Though there are less mods around than the original atm because it's still in Early Access but I hope to see some of the modders from DK1 apply their minds to DK2 post-release for some more amazing overhauls lol. 100% recommend if you enjoy the tactical planning and management. The satisfaction of watching your plan play out perfectly is amazing, though reaching that smooth plan of attack can take time and multiple attempts sometimes as the game is a little harder than the first with RPGs and heavily fortified compounds lol :)