Now's the time to play it if you ever thought about it. 1, 2, 3 years down the line this game will be another ghosted piece of media. Gets maybe 100 players during the weekends (marginally more now that some new content was dropped) and you will be playing with people that know every part of the map and every bit about how the game operates, making it immensely less fun to play even if you decide to waste as much time as I did trying to get good.

The audio is messed up. Your own teammates footsteps are incredibly loud but you can barely hear enemies stomping up to stab you. VOIP is relayed out though an entirely different speaker despite my attempts to fix it.

The UI is messed up. Enjoy trying to utilize MGs, cutting wires or building defenses when the game requires you to move to a specific position to do so, which will often get you killed. The game will bug out and put your character into a dabbing pose shunting your gun into the dirt and getting you killed. Your hud will get permanently disabled trying to talk to your team despite it not being on toggle mode, and trying to fix that will get you killed. Reloading your grenades from a box while cooking a grenade will not reload your grenades, getting you killed.

The bots are messed up. You cannot hide in a bush, near a tree, by a rock, they always see. They will walk their defined paths and they will see you and they will shoot you. They are functional at the very least and give human players a hedge to hide behind. They are basically brainless and the only ones to ever die to gas. If only they could resuppply MGs or mortars.

Respawning is messed up. Some of that can be forgiven for a game that lets you spawn on teammates in a hot firefight, but you will routinely get spawned out into the open above the ground and immediately shot and killed. If you are incredibly unlucky you can be spawned into wire, caged by wire, or under sandbags. Oftentimes your best bet is to spawn in at the point furthest away from the action, so you can walk all the way to the front to get shot and killed.

The community is messed up. Typing out the most deranged and moronic things is considered a valid tactic to force the enemy team to stop and hammer their keyboards. Thankfully there is a mute button and you will be making judicious use of it. I think insurgency's chat is worse but there are some real disgusting subhumans that play this game even I had to mute.

The progression system is messed up. While most of the unlocks are considered side-grades it's goofy to not only force players to level up a class but also make them do arbitrary tasks to get said unlocks. The default solution to this from the community at large is "Go play Bots". It's silly to force players to play with bots to finish the more difficult challenges. I'm not against challenges but they should just be for cosmetics.

Speaking of cosmetics, I was disappointed finding out the skins promised for players in the newest update were only for those that owned the original pack. It was a remake of a DLC pack. Why keep a deathgrip on cosmetics in a three year old game at the end of its life?

I did have some fun moments with this game. Particularly when both teams were evenly matched, pitching a frenzied fight and doing everything in their power to win was a lot of fun to be a part of. I respect the amount of effort that went into creating something like this, it looks good. The soldiers, guns and maps have a ton of detail embellished into them. I was very impressed until the issues above ground into me.

Would I buy this again? If they package Verdun, Tannenburg and Isonzo together and fix the issues I had, yeah. As it is now? No.

Should YOU buy it? If you are an autistic retardosexual Gamer like me, you could get your value out of it from sheer determination. But honestly I think the time could be better spent elsewhere.

Nothing like scaling a massive mountain under heavy artillery bombardment, ducking and weaving through barbed wire and trench systems, over fly-covered horse carcasses and burnt-out rubble to charge bayonet-first through a cloud of mustard gas against an alpine bunker.

To sum up Isonzo in a few brief points (longer review below):

- Extremely immersive and historically accurate weapons, uniforms, and locations.

- Perfect balance between casual arcade shooters like BF1 and hardcore mil sims like Squad 44 and HLL.

- Fantastic gameplay that benefits from amazing TTK thanks to the realistic damage and stopping power + slower RPM bolt action rifle combo.

- Incredibly well done bots and offline gameplay in addition to its somewhat smaller but passionate and generally quite healthy online player base.

- NO PAYWALL SUBSCRIPTION BATTLEPASS DLC GAMBLING MICROTRANSACTION UNFINISHED BS. You pay for a finished game (at a bargain sale price) and that’s exactly what you get! They even released their map DLC expansion completely for free because these are clearly people who actually love what they do and it shows.

- Good sound design with some minor bugs with its dynamic music that changes based on whether you’re pushing certain positions, which is worth it for how badass you feel with epic music to cue your bayonet charge.

- Solid graphics definitely on par with many games today, nothing mind blowing as its outshined by something like BF1 but I also don’t have the processing power to run everything on ULTRA with full post FX, at least if I care to have more than 2 frames per second!

FULL REVIEW:
This game is criminally neglected, it’s genuinely better than 90% of historical FPS games. It nails historical accuracy, with breathtaking maps faithful to the real geography of the Isonzo region and with missions based on the real battles that took place there over the course of almost 4 years. This game strikes the most amazing balance between the arcade Battlefield experience and the hardcore mil sim HLL challenge. The ambience is incredibly immersive, the weapons extremely faithful to real life. It’s supposed to be WW1 and it NAILS it. No hordes of highly durable enemies sprinting around with ultra-rare and anachronistic SMGs and automatic weapons like BF1, but rather a large force of detailed and customisable soldiers in period correct uniforms wielding a variety of BOLT ACTION rifles which handle wonderfully and give you the actual experience for many infantrymen during the world wars. You will have your moments to charge uphill at the enemy fortress with a fearless tenacity, but a minute later you will find yourself ducked down in a massive shell crater or trench, hiding from suppressing fire and aerial bombardment. There’s no COD style full-auto infinite-health rushing meta. One shot to centre mass will drop your enemy dead, and often you’ll be reminded by the true toll of war by their dying screams and whimpering as their extremely well-done rag doll collapses into a puddle of blood. Artillery shells exploding nearby and gunfire whizzing past your head not only puts you on the WW1 battlefields but thanks to an excellently implemented suppression mechanic it actually has an effect on players, forcing them to flinch, throwing off their aim and making them duck out of harms way. Your bayonet becomes crucial to clearing trenches, and while coordination with your officers and fellow players is an excellent way to win, there isn't the same mil sim pressure if you just want to play solo for fun. You can even have immense fun offline playing with just bots. This game probably has the best bots I’ve ever experienced. They aren’t aim-bot laser death machines, nor are they completely brain dead free kills. If it wasn’t for their sometimes slightly predictable paths you would think they were decently skilled real players, and even then they will surprise you by flanking or coming from an unexpected angle at times. There is not any single player class that is absurdly OP or unbalanced, and it has an awesome setup the way as an attacker you can get absurd amounts of kills yet if you don’t push the objectives you will lose regardless, which really promotes a constant dynamic engagement style over camp-and-farm tactics. The graphics and sound design are pretty good, though it doesn’t quite look as good as say Battlefield 1 or EA’s Battlefront games for example, but those are prime instances of notoriously pretty games, and for a lesser-known franchise Isonzo’s graphics hold up perfectly fine, and you often ignore the very insignificant shortcomings in texture or lighting simply due to the incredible immersion. The maps are seriously attractive and generally very well designed and balanced, and you honestly have just as much fun losing as you do winning. Furthermore, while you can get paid DLCs with unique historically accurate (no immersion breaking pink banana costumes sorry) skins and cosmetics, there’s no weapons or abilities locked behind a pay wall. There’s no battle pass, subscription, or micro transaction gambling BS. YOU PAID FOR THE WHOLE GAME, YOU GET THE WHOLE GAME. Being it was on sale for a great price, I gave Isonzo a cautious chance to try and satisfy my WW1 history buff itch (as aside from BF1 it’s usually the Second World War that gets all the love in media and video games) and it genuinely exceeded every expectation I had for it, even after I had read other people’s positive reviews. I hope these developers continue to put in the same passion and historically faithful, hard work into their future projects because both the gaming world and myself really need more of this.

Full of cheaters. Game is absolute ♥♥♥♥. ♥♥♥♥ that.