Recent reviews by ryam

They don't let you turn off crossplay with consoles on PC. Lol. If I wanted to play with and against console players, I'd own a console.

It's just not very good

You're not allowed to turn off crossplay lol..

The most generic and derivative shoot the enemy to instantly kill them battle royale ever created

If I had to choose one word to describe Siege, it'd be 'inept'

You might expect a 10 year old game to run well, but it has some kind of memory leak that shows up after just 3-4 matches even on a computer from 5 years in the future of its launch. Microstutters are common

You might expect Ubisoft's cash cow to have room in the budget to put love and care into its characters and cosmetics, but we're down to a dripfeed of 2 characters per year, 0 maps per year, and the cosmetics/monetization is perhaps the ugliest in all of gaming. It seems like they have one whole artist on staff and the rest is just typical outsourced garbage.

You might expect a game with an oldschool obsession with "esports" to have good matchmaking, but they've recently decided to pursue some kind of Engagement Optimized Matchmaking. That's bad enough, but what's worse is that they didn't even do it well. They cannibalized the concept of ranked to try to "engage" you with consistent microscopic droplets of dopamine from your fake rank number going up, and as a result ranked is virtually identical to Standard. There's no ladder to climb. Your rank will cap out at wherever it decides you belong. Inexplicably, you will rapidly drift away from your teammates, even if they have the exact same W/L ratio and KD as you, and even if you exclusively play the game together. Is this what engagement is?! It's really not that hard to just do real MMR, and show the players their real MMR, and calculate that based on your WR and subsequently make matches based on that, but it seems like Ubisoft thinks they knows better than you. The number they show you on your screen after a victory/defeat is completely made up, which will become apparent to you very quickly and which, to me, defeats the purpose of ranked.

You might also expect an "esport" to have a well-balanced roster of easily accessible characters, but this is an asymmetric game and you are expected to grind for anywhere between 6-8+ hours per old character and 15-30+ hours per new character, the exact length of the grind depending on your win/loss ratio and how long ago the character was released. It's not uncommon at average MMRs for the defenders to have a 100% winrate in any individual match and for the victor of the match to be decided by whoever gets to defend last, so.. have fun with that dynamic.

All of the foundations for a great game are there, it's fun and there still aren't any games like it, but it's a game managed by Ubisoft and it seems it's been left to rot in the field. I might recommend the game if it weren't for the fact that new players will need to spend dozens or even hundreds of hours learning every operator and map before you can really comfortably have fun in the game. You'll spend a lot of time dead and simply spectating via cams or watching your teammates. You won't be able to invite your friends to play the game because they'll probably quit after their first 100 matches where all they got to do was spectate (and in that case good for them for setting boundaries). I have almost 800 hours in the game and I still don't have every operator unlocked. I still die to insane new angles and spots that I'd never seen before. I can't imagine what it'd be like to try to play this game for the first time in 2024/5.

Ugly game for ugly people

Monetized like a freemium game

Play through to the max level of one character and then uninstall the game. There's nothing else there, I promise, you'll only ruin the memory.

it's worth finishing, but I think people assign these games way too much depth and nuance. memorizing animations isn't actually very interesting or fun.

absolutely butter smooth.

all vibes with very little plot or character development, but they're some really incredible vibes