Recent reviews by Matt Jackdaw

The story of the game is nice and slow burn. I like that it follows the perspective of a clone trooper of the 501'st legion without sugar coating the war. It's also nice that the story was written before the inhibitor chip retcon of the clone wars show from 2009. The maps and the scenery are beutiful, for most planets. Too bad that the only gamemode, that is populated is conquest. The maps look nice, and are open enough to allow for prolonged vehical combat, while not feeling claustrophobic, nor too open for infentry combat. Having team recognition without outlines, is a breath of fresh air, since this game was made before the era of cosmetics, every class is distinct, and recognizable. Also it's nice seeing army units in uniform gear, instead of a bunch of disconnected cosmetics. Also the blasters feel nice to shoot.

Now for the negatives, even though the campaign’s locations look quite nice, it's just the multiplayer maps, with some extra objectives placed on them. The unit spawn locations are usually tied to the objectives, and they usually just spawn out of nowhere instantly killing you, especially in the case of sniper, and engineer class enemies. So the level designe leaves a lot to be desired. On some levels the friendly AI burn through your team's lifes so fast, that it makes the level completion up to luck. Not even mentioning the occasional friendly fire incidents, that your automated allies, can get into. Besides all that, most of the online game modes don't have servers hosted for them. Also the game starts you off with every graphics settibg set to the lowest, if you have an integrated graphics card. And without any quality of life mods, this game, can show it's age sometimes.

All in all, I would recomend this classic. It allows you to execute order 66.

It's brocken. It shows a Java virtual machine error even before the game starts.
It has a free tf2 hat achivement that's basically all the apeal it has in it's current sad state.

The game can turn into a low FPS slide show real fast, especially when there are many particals on screen, or when you just shoot your flame thrower or minigun. Besides that the decision to effectively shadowban non verified servers have killed a bunch of the servers. And the legacy server browser doesn't scale with the size of the screen, being soo small that it's hard to read the server tags and names.

I swear it's a good game.

This game is, just the best.

Positives: The art style is beautiful, and unique. The lighting brings an atmosphere to the game, that is slightly eerie, yet intriguing. And it does all of that without all the ray tracing bs. The game has a good set of progression systems, yet it doesn’t use them as a crutch. The enemy and mission variety is large enough. The game actually incentivizes cooperative play through its game design. But the solo experience is also great, due to the robot companion BOSCO being a unique character, that is interactive. Instead of being a bot imitating a player character. Well made updates.
And the best part this game has no Fear Of Missing Out.

Negatives: It can be addictive, also it can become a huge time-sink.

In conclusion it is an amazing game that is worth your money, if you got the time.

This game (or game mode) feels like an afterthought. Sure shoving things around with a gravity gun might be fun for a while, but it gets old.

The map design is a bit better than half life 1 death-match, but not by much. Also It’s hard to find servers that use the base maps, most servers are running some quake like speed modes. The weapons weren’t designed with multiplayer in mind, but this isn’t that big of an issue. The constant cycle of being spawn killed, and spawn killing, gets repetitive fast, but that’s the nature of arena fps.

Although props to couple of Valve employees who fixed a bunch of bugs recently. An other positive is a lack of manipulative insentive systems. Also now it’s packaged with Half life 2, and it’s expansions.

In conclusion, it can be fun for a while, but it gets old fast.

The only reason I recomend it because it's packaged with the rest of Half LIfe 2.

TLDR: Play on community servers, untill Valve Reverts Meet your Match, back to quick play.

Upsides: The shooting feels good, the movement is fun, and the official maps are great (there are some good community maps as well.) The art style is timeless. The weapons actually change up the game. It mostly respects your time. Has a Server browser. The players actually talk. (mostly on community servers)

Downsides: It's quite addictive. Free to plays can't communicate. Community cosmetics messed up the art style. Random drops are anoying. It can be a huge time sink. Certain community maps are down right terrible. Also it has a gambling system built into it, so be careful to avoid falling for that trap.

Things I would like to see an update (how unlikely that might be.) are: the return of quickplay, and the unmuting of f2p players.

Edit: Finally after about 5 years F2P players can talk again.

Conclusion: Do not overindulge, and you'll have a fun time. If it starts to intrude too much into your life, take an indefinite break.

Just an all around good singleplayer shooter. Due to it's strong art direction, the visuals look timeless. The story is good. (but sadly it ends on a cliffhanger.) The gun play, and the gamephysics are the true highlights of the game.

The only negative I can say, is, that the multiplayer deathmatch mode feels like an afterthought.