Recent reviews by God's Drunkest Driver

To give a touch of background for the review: I have over 2000 hours in CS at LEM peak, 1000 in Valorant at Immortal 1 peak and Overwatch at GM peak. I also played the stress test as well as the last closed beta week.

As of right now, 9/11/2024, I am placed Emerald 1 and to me, this game needs way more time in the oven. I understand it is a small, self publishing company that wants to get the game out to the people/make money for further development, but it feels like a beta still.

The gunplay in this game is very unique, what I cannot put my finger on is the 'feel' of the game, something just feels off. My thought is that being able to move and shoot with a set spray pattern messes with my head so much and it makes the guns feel like total trash. I personally still think the AK in this game kicks way too hard between the 3rd-5th shot and spraying with it is death every time. Right now it feels like the 'meta' is to just buy one of the bundles with an SMG and ape a site with no care OR to crab walk around corners at random times with no utility usage. The only time I was getting over 20-30 kills in a game was when people were trying to play strategically, when someone apes me with an SMG I can do nothing due to the small size of the maps. I do not enjoy getting ran at by someone holding A or D and just apeing me due to how the ADS gunplay works, it does not feel good to play strategically when someone can just run at you with 40 bullets and full accuracy while ADS'ing.

Another thing I personally dislike is that the hip-fire does not feel good at all/is not viable to do, most guns are only 'accurate' from 10-15 meters while hip firing, even at that range the guns feels totally inaccurate. I wish this game was more of a balance between hip-fire and ADS, rather than full ADS. What I enjoyed about Valorant was that I could ADS a longer range for a nice one tap and then go back to hip firing, but I cannot do that in this game.

None of the abilities feel too powerful and there isn't really a sponsor that feels 'unfair'. My hope is that they keep to this because I have seen hero shooters go too far off the rails with abilities and it becomes a nightmare to balance because devs are too scared to just say 'we ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up and are going to change the ability entirely because we can't balance this' and it ends up being either too strong so have to pick it every time or too weak to even bother trying to make it work. The devs seem like smart people who are working fast to fix anything the community doesn't like.

I won't go too deep on the skin prices because I have seen Valorant prices and shrugged, it's not really that bad I think people just like to complain about micro transactions. I will say it is insane that you release the store before the career page, that will get your community to love you I'm sure of it. One of the devs in their discord even said "Careers aren't coming anytime soon, i'm talking 4 months. Battlepass is many months as well. We should never have put the locked states up there (in front of career and battlepass). We always planned to have the career come out after we launched the game".

I left Valorant due to the abilities becoming too strong and gunplay became overshadowed. I left OW due to the devs not listening to the community and balancing it like a casual game (even though they had the OWL at the time). If Mountaintop can understand how to balance abilities properly like they have so far and keep listening to it's playerbase, I think they have a good recipe here.

I am personally going back to CS just because gunplay should reign supreme in an FPS game and no other Tac FPS can compare to how crisp CS feels in terms of its gunplay, but maybe in a year or two they will find their footing and have something great on their hands, because right now this game feels more like a demo than a full fledged game.