izigame.me

Well, this is a long time coming. I told myself I'd give the game a proper review when 1.0 came, and here it is. I've played this game for.. nearly six years, by the time of this review, which is frightening to think about. Thankfully most of that time has been spent not playing this game, ironically enough. Which, isn't to say I don't recommend this game, I wholly do. Foxhole is an experience like no other, and frankly it's because of that, that I've stuck around for so long. I'll definitely be sticking around to see both any new updates for Foxhole, and what else the developers at Siege Camp get up to in the future.
Now, onto brass tacks.
Foxhole is an open-world, persistently online MMO centered around a global conflict in a fictional(!) universe, populated primarily by two also fictional factions. I clarify this immediately because I have seen no end of people who immediately see "green and gray man go brr" and think Axis and Allies. Which this is not, for the better, in my opinion. Aesthetically these factions do draw inspiration from real world technology spanning from about the turn-of-the-century to the mid century 1900s, giving a wide range of possible weaponry and vehicular designs. Anything ranging from drum-fed repeating rifles to compact submachineguns, from tripod-mounted 30mm infantry support guns to large, emplaced artillery pieces firing 150mm shells. All of this is to say, there's a pretty wide variety of weaponry and diverse systems spread across both factions. These factions also retain their own unique and asymmetric rosters of weaponry and vehicles as well, meaning playing either faction will result in a slightly different gameplay experience.
Infantry gameplay is likely the first you'll experience in this game, if you deploy to an active frontline. While combat is a large part of Foxhole, the biggest draw to me, is the fact that practically every single weapon, defensive or auxiliary structure, and vehicle, is hand-built by other players. Everyone contributes with every single action they take, whether that be staffing the frontline or staffing the scrapyards in the backline. Knowing this, everything you do on a frontline as a soldier now has immense implications for the rest of the war. If you shoot down someone who was just about to destroy one of your tanks, and that tank goes on to be instrumental in the next morning's push, and that push goes on to capture a town, that's something huge that you've managed to do by just participating in the battle. Not only that, but that player who assembled that tank in the backlines has had their work pay off to an even more exponential degree, maybe without even knowing about it. Every soldier in the war benefits from your positive actions, whether that just be patrolling around and keeping an eye out, carrying someone critically wounded back to a medic, or being part of a resource gathering operation, the sense of camaraderie felt between players can feel like no other.
I touched on logistics briefly, but let's take a deeper dive. Foxhole relies on a steady stream of supplies from backline facilities and town factories to keep the war moving. Every piece of kit is essential, from rifles and ammunition, to medical supplies, to gasmasks and grenades. All of these are made from a variety of different materials, of which scarcity and quantity changes vastly depending on their value. Basic materials, refined from simple Salvage, is used in the creation of most, well, basic things. Smallarms, their ammunition, uniforms, sandbags, barbed wire, tools, are all generally made from basic materials. More significant things like tanks, rocket launchers, tripod mounted weaponry, all require varying amounts of Refined materials, refined from Components. Anything requiring a significant explosive charge like grenades, shells, satchel charges, thusly, require Explosive Materials, also refined from Salvage (think of Salvage as a universal "junk haul" of things). All of these resources and the refined goods are collected, by player input, from resource fields and mines scattered throughout the world. This isn't even touching on the actual logistical hurdle of transporting all of these things around with trucks, trains, and boats, by road, rail, or river. It's quite frankly such an absurdly macro-scale system that it's honestly hard to wrap your head around at times. That all of these cogs need to be turning in time with one another at all times to fuel the war effort, and it's ALL done by individual people, working together whether actively or just contributing what little they can by themselves.
And here is the only thing that I think I can really, truly negatively say about this game. The fact that this game requires so many hands on so many things, necessitates the creation of groups to get things done in any reasonable amount of time. It is possible to play this game by yourself, but don't be surprised to see yourself spending a day or two scraping together enough materials to have fun for an hour or two. While this isn't a bad thing in and of itself (rather, I think that it's insanely cool that Foxhole has this dynamic, that requires cooperation to achieve larger and larger mountain goals,) the ingame communications system is honestly rather bad at facilitating this. The world chat is a bit of a mess at the best of times, with a pretty ineffectual "upvote/downvote" system, squads are there and functional but limited, and the regiment system is basically just a glorified "clan tag" group manager. You'd be better off getting this game with a few friends, and then building more of a network from there, than diving in headfirst by yourself and attempting to use the very sparse and limited squad and regiment management tools to accrue your own following. This may be changed or added onto in an update in the future, but as of now, just be warned that the game pretty much requires that you have others to work with, and that you're not going to get very far solely by yourself.
Honestly, I could go on and on about this game, but I'll try to cut myself short here. In the end, I do fully recommend you at least give Foxhole a try. If it hooks you, you'll more than get your money's worth with the experiences and memories you'll make out of this hectic game. Being told to hop in a tank to crew as a gunner, dodging incoming artillery shelling, digging trenches and singing a merry song with your fellow soldiers, it's all here in Foxhole. Incredibly easy to whittle away even a couple hundred hours just trying out everything in the game, much less taking part in the more organized, faction-wide operations and events held by the ingame community.
For the End, is Our Glory!