Recent reviews by Communist (real)

yeah it's alright

EITHER WE DROP TOGETHER OR WE DO NOT DROP AT ALL

If there is one thing about this game I can say with absolute certainty, it is that it hates you. This game thinks so little of you that it delights in your suffering and it's creator is no better. You will learn what stoichiometric ratios are. Good luck.

I've tried writing something concise for this game, and I think I just need to get my thoughts out into this little textbox and move on, so fair warning, word vomit incoming.

This game presents to you some very simple problems:

Firstly, the exit to the bunker you're in has been collapsed, and the only way to reopen it is to blow it up with some dynamite. As well, the detonator by the exit is missing it's plunger, so you have to locate both the dynamite and the vital item needed to make the dynamite do the thing.

Second, there is this funny little guy running around in the walls who would like very much to snap your neck or remove your head from your body, and the bullets you have aren't stopping him.

When presented like that, this game doesn't sound like it's necessarily anything special, and truly I don't think it does anything groundbreaking in it's implementation. The reason I find this game so captivating, though, is that those problems are presented to you almost exactly as I have presented them here. You have no quest markers, you have very limited access to a map, and you are left to your own devices for creating solutions.

The best example I was able to come up with (that doesn't include spoilers) is a locked door, any one of them, really. Almost unanimously locked doors can be bypassed via a half dozen solutions, most of which come with some sort of downside. My personal favorites being blowing them up with some sort of explosive (loud), or making the monster do it for you (monster). This is only a small example, and realistically you're going to be grappling with more complicated issues on a moment to moment basis; this leads you to doing things you might not under more controlled circumstances.

For $25 this game is short, sweet, and fun. If you pick it up on sale it would an absolute steal.

If I had to sum this up in a TL;DR I would put it like this:

There is no correct or specific solution to any of the puzzles in this game, you have to create them diegetically. Definitely worth the asking price.

You exit the door to the tutorial and it says "Go" and then there's an entire continent to explore and die in. You can figure it out from there.

$60 is steep, same as always, so maybe wait for a holiday sale or something, but if you don't want to wait I think my $60 was worth my first 70 hours.

Strafe is a game that I've put a decent bit of time into, played with friends in calls and jammed for ages and ages with. I just recently started doing challenge runs to test my skill with the base gameplay, meshing the various in game modifiers against eachother to see what I can get going.

Here's the long and the short of it, do I recommend this game? Yes, absolutely. I've put 40 something hours into it at this point and I don't regret a single one of them. It's challenging, it's always engaging, and it's worth your time. The various easter eggs are good for anyone up to date with old FPS games and the memes therein.

That isn't to say that this is perfect, by any means. There are some bugs where the game doesn't correctly behave, and both myself and my friends have encountered situations where runs died due to mechanics not working properly or something going wrong. Of the issues I've encountered none have been so gamebreaking as bad generation that prevents progress or having no path forward.

Tl;Dr, buy Strafe, play it aggressively. It's a good time.

I loved this.

Paladins, before the most recent update to how the card system works, was a good romp. It might still be, I'm not sure, but I refuse to support this game after the introdction of a pay-to-win system similar to the one introduced in Star Wars Battlefront 2's card-drop system. But anyway, into the review.


After spending some time with Paladins, the gameplay was good. I enjoyed queue-ing up with friends and pubstomping. It was an oddly easy game to pick up. The (previous) card system was simple and felt good to use. Allowing for a single character to be an off tank or a damage character. You never knew what you were going up against and that made every match feel different. Even if you and the enemy team had the exact same composition it never felt like a complete mirror.

After a little but of time to adjust to how to characters in Paladins feel compared to TF2 or Overwatch it became very apparent to me that whilst movement is very important in the previous games, in Paladins the thing that matters above that is placement. Sure, your movement matters a lot in Paladins as well but far fewer characters have a movement ability. More often than not you'll find abilities to affect your placement and potentially deal some damage.

However, the gameplay being as solid and nice to play as it is, the systems currently included in the game damage it beyond repair. The previous card system was similar to the one implemented. You got cards out of loot boxes and they allowed you to change how your character played. However, before they weren't level locked. Before the cards were given to you and in your loadout you were able to adjust to what extent the cards affected your character. Now cards out of boxes are level locked. You have all of them unlocked by default, however they do not allow you to decide what level they are. The only way to do that is by opening up loot boxes. Whereas before you were able to decide what level the card would be, and that would determine how your character played, now you have to piece together whatever bull the RNG decided to spare you.

Every loadout also had a max level you could assign to it so you couldn't just assign it all max level cards and be done with it. You had to plan it out. Decide which cards were going to require being stronger vs cards that you could handle having a lower level on. This allowed you to cater to your specific playstyle without ever having a loadout that was the loadout for a character.

Whereas a card before that you uncrated would say what it did and then the chart of the card would look like:



Now it looks like:


This makes level 4 cards distinctively and unarguably better than even level 3 cards.


If Hi-Rez ever decide to pull their head out of their ass and roll back this change, I will gladly re-write this review. However, in the mean time, this is a stance I will not budge on. Pay to win games are not fun. They aren't fun, and never will be.


Do not play Paladins. Don't support coporate greed. And above all else, do not give people who do this your money.

Thank you.

Right now I wouldn't buy this game. Everything works okay for me, but a lot of other people seem to be having quite a lot of issues with it. I personally have no problem booting the game up, changing the graphical settings or anything to that description. But there is a HUGE issue right now. The aiming mode. It's impossible to do with a keyboard and mouse. If you have a gamepad ready, sure, go right on ahead. But if you're like me and prefer you old keyboard and mouse combo you're boned.

EDIT----------------------------------------------

So in a recent beta patch they fixed the aiming bug, so I would definitely reccomend to anyone who want to replay this outstanding game.