Recent reviews by Mike.C

Best part: Dungeon crawling and Heroes
Worst Part: lack of support and endless annoying bugs.... (devs abandoned the title)

This is what EA should be like, these devs get it and are professionals when it comes to game design, programming and community involvement!

Update 16Mar2016: Optimization is still a huge issue, by this point i expected these issues to be mostly ironed out, but regardless the game is still 9/10

2yrs later and they are still trying to figure out how to optimize a shell of a game... This team clearly lacks experience and little has been accomplished. Save your $19 until this team can prove they deserve it, like another member mentioned, don't feel bad for them, instead demand results and then they might be able to earn back our support.

Development pace:
The current team size is extremely small, but development has steadily been chugging along with weekly patch updates addressing community concerns and feature tweaks. While the list of concerns and tweaks needed are long, DEVs are slowly getting their massive list of must "haves" and "does" accomplished and their pace is very acceptable considering the size of the DEV team.

Game play (in its current state):
The game play is very barebones as it currently stands, but the current shell is closely following the SOCOM formula and progress as mentioned above is being made improving the game weekly.

Community interaction:
The team currently does not have a fulltime community manager or PR representative, while this affects many members of the community because the studios project was crowd funded it is understandable on certain levels. While I would like to see more interaction with the community as a whole I also don't understand the whole scope of the DEV teams other obligations so I will avoid speculation and instead encourage the SOF president to address those concerns on a personal level in good faith.

Recommendation:
A great idea that I have seen one indie DEV studio do is have a linked twitter account that updates all the work on a hour to hour basis so those who truly want to track the progress real time can https://twitter.com/rustupdates

Positives: (review will be updated as content is added)
- Overall look is the closest thing to the originals
- Current weapons are true to the originals
-Maps resemble original early SOCOM maps (tweaking is still needed to better balance, but that is ongoing and developing overtime)
-Demolition (while in a shell and first stage)
-Third person view angles closely follow originals, to include first person view and crosshairs
-Devs taking community feedback into consideration and making adjustment where needed
- Progress is being made on a consistent and measureable basis
-Weapon mechanics are on the right path (to include grenade and secondary weaponry)

Negatives: (review will be updated as content is added)
- UI needs to be reworked (kill feed, weapon icons, health icons, text chat in game, etc)
- Animations need to be polished and added (lean left/right, dive to prone, etc)
- Sound effects need to be tweaked (direction of fire and depth of sound, to include music and dialogue tuning)
-Line of sight needs adjustment (crosshairs are not true to bullet trajectory path)
-No (PTT) Push to talk is not in yet (this feature was truly a must need at EA release)
-Shot indicators (red arrows showing rough direction of fire)
-Lack of overall available feature set for current stage of the game (more features would of truly helped showcase the games direction)
-No mini map

Final Thoughts:
HHour has that SOCOM feel for what it currently is and with the current pace could be what we are all hoping it will be in about the next 7-12 months. I would love to see a full time PR/community manager added to the SOF team as we did in the past. I would only recommend picking up the game in its current state if you are truly looking to help shape the game or simply want to provide support for ongoing development.

I will continue to ensure that my concerns are projected through constructive criticism so the DEVs have a realistic vision of where their game is potentially heading.

UPDATE 12/19/2015

Progress is still steadily being accomplished, the vision is still on track! Progress has been slower than expected, features that should have been in game are not. The Devs have been more open and transparent in relation towards the games current state, but at the same time key features that would attract an audience are not there still, more experience is needed on the team.

+Maps have been redesigned (wolf run and Sisimus) greatly improving play along with a few more game modes added.
-Slower than expected development and missing key features that would bring the community closer

So far HHour is still on track to fit the vision of a true successor to the early SOCOM titles, but the question at this point is will they actually have the resources and time to finish it?

UPDATE: 01 SEPTEMBER 2018

Progress has severly slowed over the last 12 months. HHour is kept alive through community workshop map makers at this point with very little change to any core features. It was announced back in March 2018 that HHour is now in BETA, but its very buggy and lacks features to be considered a BETA IMO.

Current Trello board: https://trello.com/b/PDxVeWXN/h-hour-worlds-elite-road-map Which has not been updated since March of 2018...

Steamcharts show the game never gains sustainable growth: https://steamcharts.com/app/293220


- MINIMALIST RANK SYSTEM: Rank system sorta added (currently you can only gain rank, no punishment for poor play).

- RANK LOGIC: based on the rank of your team vs your opponent. What this means if you have higher ranked players on your side, you recieve no rank score most of the time. This is flawed because rank only increasees meaning eventually you will be a 4 star...

- GUN SOUNDS: guns sound like they are flat with no depth of range still

- ANIMATIONS: poorly executed animation with current improvement hardly changing the look

- WEAPONS: weapon balance is arguable at best

- NETWORK / NETCODE: Hit registration is "OK" but can result in questionable outcomes. Huge FPS drop in gun fights along with full rooms of 16 players.

Unfortunately there is still a lack of transparency which has hurt the potential growth this game could have. While there are new players every couple of months, non of them ever last more than 30-90 days due to the slow pace, lack of true status of development, and minimalist patches that keep the game feeling unfinished.

This game is survived by the gracious volunteers who work on it in their spare time, but the actual owners of the IP, Rosie and Thomas posses no real skills to build a game whether its programming, environmental design or animation work... They have no choice but to rely on volunteers.

Here is what we need to see:

- Transparency from the IP owners (what is the "real" current state of PS4 release? do we have a actual timeline? if not what are you thinking? What features are getting a massive overhaul and update ((Rank system, Clan system, etc))

- Economy based rank system (rank goes up and down based on performance)

- Dedicated Hosted servers

- Netcode / Networking optimization

- Believable animations and weapons / sounds

- Clan System

- Ability to create ranked rooms

- More loadout options

- Polished UI

- Game breaking bugs FIXED

- Clan War system (internal)

For the current asking price of the game, i will still recommend it if you want to play with the same 25-50 people daily ($9.99) but i can no longer recommend the game if you are looking for a long term SOCOM fix, this game just has not shown its future potential in a clear way (update the TRELLO!)

I will keep it a thumbs up until PS4 Release or March 2019. At that point if we do not see any of the final feature polished added, i must walk away.

For Alpha this game has lots of potential and runs fairly well here are the key things that it has going for it currently:

1. Playability is great, they ironed out nearly all of the game breaking bugs within the first 3 days considering how flooded the servers were to start so you can expect a smooth gaming experience.
2. crafting works well, lacks features but works and you are able to atleast build a basic hut and bare bones base. you can craft a handful of basic items and obtaining the loot to make such items are fairly easy to find.
3. movement and driving mechanics are on point and feel fairly smooth and fluid; nearly everything is interactive, nice touch.
4. Loot is very rare at this time, and finding weapons on such a small map can be very painstaking; the server holds upwards of 200 players. (maybe loot should scale based on the amount of players in the server)
5. Zombies are more annoying than dangerous, they present a lack of actual AI they merely aggro to your last known spot in a slow jogging pace, so dont expect the PvE to be engaging what-so-ever.

Those are the main things to point out at this time for those interested.

Really cool game. it reminds me alot of a 3D version of Starbound, but with more depth and adventure!

Awesome game, Minecraft style but real physics and streamlined graphics.