Recent reviews by conscript

The game is really fun but on higher difficulties scrakes and fleshpounds are absolute bullet sponges. With the few perks available there are no counters like KF1's sharpshooter (whose xbow to the head could neutralize a scrake), so some poor soul who grabbed aggro has to 'tank' and die while everyone else bursts it down with regular guns. Kiting is not an option, medics can't heal through the damage, and of course the bezerker can't parry them. No real strategy involved here, and it kind of ruins the fun of dealing with the mass hordes of lesser, stereotypical zombie zeds.

Right now, any of the servers with dozens of people on higher difficulties (suicidal, hell on earth) never reach the boss because it's impossible to beat the scrakes and fleshpounds unless there's just one. Not that the boss would be possible, regardless. Still, the first 4 waves of hundreds of weak zeds with 30 people on the wide open custom maps is a blast.

In its current state it's sort of easy to get burned out on the game, but its very promising and already one of the better co-op shooters. It could just really use mutators to control what zeds spawn, specifically to exclude the elite, bullet-sponge zeds.

I picked this up when it was on sale and I regret it, it's easily the worst Total War of the franchise and some aspects of it pale in comparison to the original Rome Total War. The AI is incredibly awful especially in sieges, and for some reason them sending 1 unit stacks to attack your garrisons isn't uncommon at all. Naval warfare is ruined by transport ships which are superior to any standing navy. The politics make no sense, armies are tied to generals now, turns take ages to go by, all units fight like undisciplined mobs and lose any sense of cohesion and formation from the start of a fight, and late game is incredibly, incredibly boring. On top of this they release with basically mandatory DLC (Greek States DLC is a big middle finger to the fanbase) and soon later an expansion for a $60 beta. CA...give me back my money!

I hope CA can turn this around but it's not looking good. They fixed a lot of serious bugs since release but there's just so much lacking in this game in the core, everything about it screams rushed. The 40% increased budget isn't noticable at all, as the AI that was proclaimed to be seriously invested in just isn't good, and the graphics are nice but don't live up to the promotional pictures from the alpha. With the speed battles take place now there's not really any time to admire them, or the individual fights between units for that matter (not sure why I bought blood and gore DLC honestly)