Let me start out by saying: IF YOU PLAY THIS GAME FOR TOO LONG YOUR SAVEGAME WILL BE CORRUPTED. So thanks for making the game a broken mess with DOZENS of hours of FILLER CONTENT. I was really excited for this, as most peopel were, but I was very worried. I knew that this wasn't going to be some GTA clone or some reinvention of the wheel, but what I got is NONETHELESS VERY DISAPPOINTING. The core gameplay mechanics and loop, NEVER changes. Your experience with this game in hour 1 is the same as in hour 40. Sure you get levels, and perks and AN ABUNDANCE OF LOOT, which you'll LOATHE to pick up after a couple of hours, but the mechanics will always remain the same. Shooting is fun, but fundamentally broken with damage modifiers stacking to infinity, making any notion of changing our weapons a non-issue since... your eally don't need it. Stealth is okay but is fundamentally milquetoast. YEARS ago Deus Ex had things like "Corner Takedowns etc" this has NONE of that, it is ALWAYS the same, guessing whether the AI will see you or not, rules constantly changing and arbitrary as hell. Sometimes they see you through a solid wall, other times they don't see you when you stand NEXT to them. Levelling up is a joke, your stats only contribute to arbitrary skill checks that come up with no rime or reason in some missions and are again absent in similar other ones, even if you encounter one of those checks like (CAN I FORCE OPEN THEN DOOR), you never have to since there is always at least 3-4 other options available because you have to pander apparently to people so that EVERYONE can do ANY MISSION ANY TIME WITH ANY BUILD... so... it DOESN'T MATTER WHAT YOU SKILL INTO. Asde from the genuinely enjoyable story quests all this is is a giant checklist of a hand full of mission types strewn all over a sheel of a city. You'll dart from marker to marker, doing the same stuff, over and over, with every iteration the game breaking more and more alongside with your patience.
As I bought this, I hoped I get into a fun, challenging and at least somewhat modern "War Game" type of game with a decent singleplayr campaign attached. To say that I am severely disappoitned is quite the understatement. I can take some janky-ness, I don't subscribe to the nnotion that every game needs to be some absolutely polished diamond of refinement and emergent systems, but THIS GAME IS SO FRUSTRATING. Not because of it's difficulty, which is my opinion based around the fact that the AI might be cheating in more or less minor ways, but I haven't looked into that, so let's say the AI is not cheating. So why is it frustrating? THE CONTROLS ARE TERRIBLE. I seriously can't remember a game that has frustrated me this much with it's handling of it's control scheme, and I play Arma 1-3 on a regular basis and even that is MILES better than this desaster of a control scheme. CAN'T EVEN CHANGE THOSE CONTROLS. Movement is janky, rotating units is a chore. YOU CAN'T BOX SELECT UNITS, you have to tediously draw doodle like circles around them, which leads to misselection of units. You have to spent SO MUCH TIME on simply managing that your unit is moving from one place to the next in the right direction/formation, which is not fun. Right off the bat you confrontated with difficult scenarios, with NO TUTORIAL MISSIONS attached, all you get is some videos showing you that you can click on a unit to select it (oh boy... thanks for the heads up Mr. Game Dev Sir!) and a link to a Wiki, no strategies, no mood pieces, no Fluff, no guidance. And on top of that MOST GAME SYSTEMS ARE as OPAQUE as an obsidian formation at sundown. Why are my men not charging? Probably because of Moral, or some other factor which is never explained in the game. Such important information is relagated to a small textbox in the upper left corner of the screen, with no apparent indicators anywhere else. And even that indicator tends to get FLOODED WITH GRAPHICAL ARTIFACTS of some kind. I have barely put a couple hours into this OVERPRICED MESS, of an UNDERWHELMING, FEATURE STARVED, barren wasteland of fun and I'm not willing to put up with this anymore. I'd rather read up on how to rewrite the entire Witcher 3 game in ACII characters (which is probably at least as fun, if not more) than to play this mess of a game. I really wanted to like this game. I really love war games like WH40k Rites of War, WH40k Armageddon, Panzer Corps etc. but this is one to avoid at all cost.
