Recent reviews by Cookie Monster

Well, I would say "meh", but because steam have only two options I choose "don't recommend"

Sorry for my bad english, not my native language.

tl;dr - Shooting sitting ducks in slow moving cardbox simulator. Game mechanics won't let me have fun with it. A lot of grind, and constant micromanagement of a crew and manual labor in strategy game about teamwork. It has some interesting moments in capturing points and fighting tanks, but dull in closer inspection.

If you want longer version:

Good things:

1. It’s fun to run through trench lines, driving an unstoppable fortress of death, spreading lead, fire and desperation in every direction (but this feeling quickly vanishes due to bad things I wrote down there)
2. Leveling of crew is interesting, there is a real difference between lvl 1 and lvl 5 judging by description of abilities. And abilities themselves are good and can really turn defeat into victory (like +100% to fire rate for 15 seconds)
3. Customisation of tanks is neat too, you can choose guns, armor, type of tank etc. And you can feel the difference between them.
4. The graphics overall a good, pleasant picture and effects.

Bad things:

1. No queue for commands. Like, for real? Every strategy game have this. I can't press "Shift + left-click" for giving several commands. Example: your gunman spent all of the ammo in the machine gun and you have to get a new one from the ammo crate, okay, makes sense. But you can only send your gunmen to pick up ammo and he will be standing there after he takes one waiting for the next command. In the first mission of the campaign you have 6 men and 5 guns, and after EVERY ammo depletion you have to send them manually and wait when they take ammo and only after that send them back. And it's like that for every action, healing, repairing, etc. I see an easy fix, that cuts in half all of your actions just by adding queues. Or at least checkbox "auto-refill" on guns or something. For now the game is 50% micromanaging your crew like they are kids.

2. Really weird physics, barbed wire somehow fully stops your tank everytime you hit it. Two dozen tons of metal fully stopped by wooden sticks, mkay. Sometimes terrain have no influence at your tank, sometimes you have to spend 1-2 minutes just to get out of small puddle. Physics is not intuitive and random, there is no momentum for tanks, it will stop dead as soon as you stop pressing W. You feel like you are driving a cardbox, not a tank. It’s worse than World of tanks.

3. You can't give direct orders to your crew about shooting specific targets. In the first mission you have to destroy a lot of barbed wires and mines. But you have only two options. First one - smash them all with your tank, it’s a very long and not fun grind. The second - shoot them with guns. But your crew won't do that themselves and you can’t order them to do that, so you have to stop around every barbed wire/mine and shoot them yourself, manning a gun. And yeah, each wire can eat almost a full magazine of a machine gun, so there goes bulldozing for 10 minutes for you. A lot of manual labor in a game about teamwork.

4. Where are the infantry and other tanks? You drive alone all the time. No backup tanks, no infantry that follows your trail through enemy lines, they only show up after you clear the whole battlefield of barbed wire.

5. AI and pathfinding. Oh my god it’s bad. Your crew inside the tank will do weird maneuvers and circles around guns, seats etc. And the crew is very slow. Same goes for infantry, but worse. I’ve seen 5-7 times AI soldiers just glitching near barbed wire until the enemy would kill them, and you can’t capture major points, you have to wait for AI dummies to do that, so you can imagine how frustrating it’s to wait for them. And somehow AI doesn't use cover at all. Neither enemies or allies. You will see a lot of AI just standing in an open area or in front of your guns lol. Same goes for enemy, it’s just L4D or Payday style suicide bots. Enemy tanks do the same, rushing at you with no tactics or using cover or any kind of strategy.

6. Smokescreen. I’ve used it everytime I could. And as I figured the mechanic is simple - the enemy and your crew won't shoot through smoke. But half of the time the enemy will run towards you, stand behind smoke and shoot/throw grenades at you, but your crew won’t shoot ‘em back for some reason, and you have to manually operate guns to kill bastards. So here you are again, doing yourself the job of AI.

7. And finally - accuracy. It’s bad. You can spend a full magazine (30 rounds) shooting at a guy in a trench, 10 meters away from you and not hitting him even once.

I found this game to have real potential, because there are not a lot of games that give you command over people in tank like that. Really good idea with bad execution. You trying to have fun, but constantly fighting AI/bad_game_design and doing the job of your crew by yourself.

I would recommend to add the game to wishlist and wait until they fix the problems or buy it on sale, in current state the game is not worth 20$