izigame.me

After small investment of 2200 hours in this journey, Time of Review has come. Let's dive in the mechanically best shooter on the market, developed by company that does not want to respect player time or money.
There are few truly great aspects - but I will keep it short as it pains me to talk about them, because they are being overshadowed quickly by obnoxious business practices and devs distancing from playerbase and ignoring feedback.
Best of all mechanics has to be the audio. You can learn to distinguish any weapon and distance it was shot at by sound cues alone. Game knowledge of weapon ammo pools and approximate fire rates helps to crawl out alive from firefights. You can also listen for victims inside buildings and pinpoint their exact location based even on what they are walking to surprise some louder fella through walls to secure a kill or at least give a serious scare.
Having a decent audio gear makes traversing this world a real treat.
Huge recommendation for their own in-house band - Port Sulphur Band. They are making enjoyable soundtracks that are making their way into daily music playlists of mine.
Close behind audio chases the gunplay. Game is set in late 19th century, all of the guns are satisfying to play, majority of weapons are semi-auto and single shot, with impactful reloads that take time and make sound. All of weapons made as historically accurate as possible without affecting viability in game with very few deviations. Instant head-shot kill mechanic makes weapon balance mostly a non-issue personally.
Maps are superbly designed, they are spacious, but not feeling desolate. Each map consists of 16 compounds that are diverse and all of them have meticulously crafted multiple approaches for more unpredictable gameplay loop.
Trait art style - No gameplay impact, just beauty, have to give a shout-out. Artist should be proud.
Now that positive aspects have been covered, time to cover the marketing and lovely customer support/feedback:
This atrocity can not be called a game anymore, it is just a monetisation incarnate. If You hear about earning in-game currency (Blood Bonds) by just playing or developers caring about the game, that reflects a bygone era.
Now monetisation is increasingly getting worse and is comparable to mobile game industry, while by itself it would not affect gameplay - there is our first real issue - most updates focus on new skins rather than fixing bugs and exploits that are game-breaking and are still accessible. Fixing bugs unfortunately for Crytek can not be sold for 10 bucks a month.
During a month we are getting approximately 5 skins to be purchasable in-game with Blood Bonds(BB) and 1-2 10 EUR DLCs. Altogether some 40+ EUR a month worth of skins. With in game skins being so badly priced the 10 EUR DLC seems like a good deal. It still is not a good deal, imo, especially when that money does not show any effect by fixing the game.
To make it worse - almost all means of earning in game currency by playing are gone. The only reliable remaining system "Challenges" is getting increasingly more grindy despite constant player feedback.
Considering that people bought this game with premise of earning the BBs by playing, this is blatant scam and possibly only reason that we have this Challenge reward system is to avoid legal trouble of fraud.
Before summer 2023 You gained BBs just by playing the game and meeting different milestones during match, rewarding a good performance, now only time You get rewarded is when You enter CVV.
Obtaining a skin this way takes 5 months due to hard cap introduced by their monetisation manager. Or the same cost for a battlepass, that lasts 3 months and is getting intentionally more grindy due to progression being tied to the Challenges.
Crytek also seem to have done some extensive research and come to ground-breaking conclusion - event means player spike, and that is why the base game has been inaccessible for almost a year now.
They are using events as beta to test new features which never get hotfixed and just block base gameplay. Events are being released one after another with 14-30 days in-between. People take break from game for two weeks missing base game due to burn out from event grind just to be greeted by another event after two weeks.
At this point we are observing new way to release a game. Instead of early access hell this game is reverting from full release to beta permanently.
Community has requested separate non-event queue, but that falls on deaf ears - Quite possible is that they can not put 10 Eur mark on separate matchmaking. Yet.
This event spam has also made the gunplay considerably worse and that is the reason why it falls behind soundwork. Previously each gun had few custom ammo types that have different effects (e.g. set target ablaze, bleed, poison). Now most weapons share almost all the types making game knowledge less relevant, not possible to narrow down possible threats.
Game is steering towards one best meta weapon having all the ammos and other weapons losing any importance.
These events also are usually released with balance patches, that are main reason people are usually trying the game again, in hopes of fixed bugs and exploits and people not spamming same weapon (SPOILER ALERT: nothing changes, so we have same player drop off yet again).
FOMO practices is horror level - timed battlepass, progressively more grindy weekly to earn BBs, event limited skins.

Next huge issue is cheaters. And sadly due to marketing this is not going to change.
Soft-cheaters and blatant cheaters both infest this game.
Soft cheating also known as "Ping-abusing". Hits are registered client side, while the idea is nice - not letting people with worse internet to struggle behind - we are running into people abusing this as META. Players are connecting to servers on other side of the world and/or using VPN to increase the ping to gain advantage. This is also practiced by streamers and Crytek partners.
Due to this ping-abusing You may die as far as 10-20 meters from the place You were on Your screen. Even their "Kill View" system shows Your body miles away from the place where the shot was registered.
Blatant cheaters are the ones that use aimbot through walls from other side of map instantly after spawning as the worst case and just wall/aim hackers as the most tame.
And here also comes the lovely customer support and player feedback.
People are giving absolutely positive feedback about previously reduced grind in Challenge system - Grind gets increased and complaints ignored.
People are requesting separate non-event queue to actually enjoy game as they bought it at least once a year - Ignored
People are requesting to limit ping to servers to avoid soft-cheating - Ignored
People are reporting blatant cheaters through CS, as it is only place Crytek allows it - They are still running with same account and cheats without any consequences.
These are just few things, but the trend stays - feedback falls on deaf ears unless it can be sold for money or better look for investors. And Crytek is allowing cheating just to not reduce player numbers by banning. There is no other explanation why cheaters that are reported with video proof are not being banned at all.
Latest event is recycling parts of previous event, possibly due to rushed release to retain players, because player bleed to other great releases like Helldivers 2 is unforgivable sin. With all the increasing grind and event spam having another game to play, a job or - god forbid - a family is heretic sin in eyes of Crytek. Only people that play their game exclusively matter. And even those do not matter enough that their feedback would be relevant.
TL;DR - 40 Eur game with F2P mobile game monetisation and borderline fraud towards earliest players in community. Feedback that is constantly ignored and even spat upon. Cheaters of varying degree, that are let rampant to boost active player numbers.