Recent reviews by [WEST] hackosaurus [Team Pyro]

The game itself does so many things right, especially for a live service game. The "meta" has gotten a little wonky lately but overall is still great.

However, I can't recommend the game at the moment given the bait-and-switch forced PSN account linking change that was just announced. Sony needs to understand that changing the requirements/ToS after launch like this is unacceptable.

Wow, Sony actually listened and seems to be removing the PSN account linking requirement. Who doesn't love a happy ending. Freedom is victorious once again.

The Finals is like a handful of Chiclets gum. At first it's this refreshing blast of color and flavor and it feels great. But then it loses its flavor super fast, and you realize all the different colors are just the same flavor, and maybe a handful of little gum tablets, while fun at first, isn't the best way to do gum.

The game looks great and is overall smooth. The classes are distinct both functionally and visually, and if played correctly they work well together. The weapons look amazing and feel pretty good. The music and animations are all great. You can pick up and throw explodey, poison, fire, and "goo" tanks. You can destroy almost anything. The hitmarkers come back fast and the netcode seems to be very good overall. If a game starts to run too long it starts a special event for the last few minutes to change things up, like low gravity, or exploding bodies. The announcers talk about you and the other teams and make you feel like people are rooting for or against you. Honestly when you start playing the game it just inspires hope and feels exciting.

But then you play for a few hours, and the magic starts to fade. The announcers say the same things over and over again. You just stumble from one objective to the next and every game feels like the last game, with nothing particularly interesting or memorable happening from game to game.

I'm personally not a fan of the layout of any of the maps; they feel way too huge and they're too hard to navigate. They're always so empty; it feels like there should be 32 or even 64 players on these maps but there's only 9 or 12. I'm probably just bad at the game but I hate navigating the maps. Jumping off of a ledge seems to fail too often. I spend 80% of the time wondering how to across this big void or how to get up this 10 story building. Half the time the grappling hook just slams my face into the roof overhang or into a ceiling and then I just fall back down to the ground like an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and I have to wait another 15 seconds before I can use it again. It just feels like a chore to get to the objectives and I felt like most of the game was spent getting to the objectives.

I think this game is trying to be something new and different, and I think it succeeds at that while doing a ton of other things right that other games have been getting wrong lately. I think a lot of people are responding positively to that. But I think at the end of the day, just doing something different isn't good enough on its own. And I think that once the novelty of The Finals wears off, the core gameplay that remains just isn't interesting, or memorable, or diverse enough to make me want to keep playing.

Campaign was pretty good; give us more!

The garbage F2P live service multiplayer is the worst of any Halo series, with frustrating and inconsistent gameplay. Even worse is the ranked system which is expertly designed not just to keep you playing but also to motivate you to drag other people through the mud with you. All for a chance for 343 to get in on some of that sweet microtransaction money.

Stay away if you are on M&K. Controller players have a huge "accuracy" advantage with "reticle magnetism" aka aim assist and playing against them is basically playing against an aimbot at close to medium range. To make up for cranking up the controller aim assist too high, 343 implemented "reticle friction" in M&K that changes your sensitivity when the reticle is over an enemy. It will mess with your muscle memory like mouse acceleration and you CAN NOT turn it off. You'll wonder why you can't dial your sensitivity in quite right and it's because the sensitivity is only at about 80% when you're tracking someone, so you have to work harder to track them than you did to snap to them. IMO this is completely unforgivable; every game needs to provide raw or linear mouse input options for M&K, period. If the devs feel like "reticle friction" helps balance against the OP controller aimbot, great, put it in there, but let me choose to turn it on, otherwise it's just a slap in the face. But what are you gonna do? It's a dumpster fire F2P live service game; they can make up the rules as they go because you didn't pay any money for it.

"Desync", 343's word for lag, is still a huge problem. Hitmarkers are extremely delayed, on the order of half a second, regardless of your ping. You will regularly melee someone directly in the back but then they'll teleport two feet and take no damage. There are times when it will feel good and responsive but these are few and far between. Combined with "reticle friction" it makes M&K a nightmare.

Matchmaking is the worst I've seen in any game especially with ranked matches. Solo ranked is an uphill battle; you need to squad (fireteam) up with other decent players in order to have a chance of reaching higher ranks. Matchmaking literally works against you harder the higher you rank up, which might actually seem logical, but it does so by setting you up to lose by teaming you with lower-ranked players, not just pitting you against higher-ranked players. You might think "so what, I can still get a good score even if my team doesn't care". Well, even if you have a 50% higher score than anybody else and actually played the objective while your rando teammates just went for kills, and your team lost the game, that's -8 skill points for you. If you win a game under the same conditions, that's +9 skill points. Guess what kind of game you're going to have more often? There is a huge score bias in going for kills vs the objective and losing carries an unreasonable penalty regardless of how much you contributed individually. And again, the matchmaking system WILL intentionally set you up to lose and the skill point system doesn't care how well you did, only whether your team won or lost.

On top of that, if your connection drops or the game freezes, that's -15 skill points. If somebody else drops making it 4 on 3 and you want to bail so you don't have waste the next 10 minutes getting thrashed, that's going to be -5 skill points if you're lucky. If you stay on and try to push through but inevitably lose, that's -8 skill points at best. The skill points are mostly about punishment and only occasionally give you that little hit of a reward to keep you playing.

It's sad to see this extremely cash-grabby incarnation of Halo but it was probably inevitable.

I really want to like this game, because the visual experience is actually great, but the gameplay experience is just so inconsistent, from one round to the next, one week to the next, one month to the next. There's still basically no teamwork, because you get thrown in with a new group of randos every single round. It's extremely rare to be put on a squad where even a single person has a mic or shows any interest in working together. Or you start in a 32-v-32 that has 16 players and 48 bots. Or you get tossed onto the losing team with a few minutes left to play. The hitreg feels good some rounds and terrible other rounds. Every round is wildly different from the last and almost never in a good way.

The closest they came to making the round-to-round experience more consistent was with the addition of portal servers, where the players on the server all remain together from one round to the next. But if you actually manage to find a good server one day it'll just be gone the next day, because the server will just despawn when empty and won't come back until the "host" recreates it. There are also no dedicated hardcore modes, just the occasional random hardcore mode that they throw into the rotation; it'll be there one week and gone the next. On that note, I do feel like the balance in most of the hardcore modes was actually pretty good, and those rounds were actually pretty enjoyable, until the whole mode (I believe it was HC rush at the time) was removed from the rotation.

I think the class update is a step in the right direction in general but the balance just feels wrong; recon feels so under-powered at all ranges compared to other classes. I keep hoping the devs will get the balance right, and I think that's how they get you hooked you with this awful live service model; they can release an incomplete game that provides an experience which is 90% frustrating and 10% enjoyable, but the fact that they keep making little tweaks over time keeps you playing because it gives you hope that one of those tweaks will finally make the game mostly enjoyable. But they will never really get there, because BF2042 was built on a foundation of lies rather than well-established mechanics and gameplay from the earlier BF titles. It will never be on par with BF3 or Bf4, let alone achieve what was promised at launch. It's such a shame to say but even if this game was F2P it still wouldn't be a good value.

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I've spent a few more hours in the game since the original review and things continue to get worse. No hardcore maps in playlists. Half the playlists are literally now just "24/7 our spammy new map". Conventional sniping is still so hilariously underpowered compared to other classes and snipers have such little ammo. Any assault rifle or LMG can mow people down in comparison and have tons of ammo to spare. IMO all sniper rifles should 1-shot under 50 m. Period. There have been times when it's taken 3 hits at ~50m to kill people with the GOL. What a joke. With this update we got all of zero new sniper rifles and one new dmr. But like 6 new assault rifles/LMG/SMG. They might as well just throw the whole sniper class away, the devs clearly don't care about it. Another nice treat from the devs with this update was to reset and/or clear a bunch of the key mappings; I really had fun trying to figure out what keys weren't working.

Class update has definitely been an improvement; the class-specific gadgets are nice. But the overall experience still sucks. Still just different randos every single game. I feel like I never get put into a squad where any other players make even top 20 on the team. The teamwork is never there and it feels like everyone's just running around and not really working together. Portal servers do not effectively solve this problem. Oh and I love that the fire mode resets every round, so my first death every round is almost always due to expecting my G57 to be in burst mode when it's actually in semi-auto. In terms of performance of the game itself feels great and smooth, but hitreg feels terrible. I know I have to lead the shot but it feels like the lead is always off, especially compared to bf4, with every weapon and at all distances. Not sure if it's variation in player ping or what but it is just so inconsistent and awful.

Devs: Give us hardcore mode in the playlists. Give us dedicated servers, or servers that live for a few hours at a time, or really just some way to keep playing with people from one game to the next. Show the sniper class some love or just throw it away already; make sniper rifles 1-hit kill under 50m to give them any chance of matching the KPS for other weapons. Persist the fire mode or allow us to set the default fire mode for weapons. This new map is not good enough to have it occupy basically half of the playlists via 24/7 modes. Just put it in the normal rotation with higher probability or something. Did I mention give us hardcore modes in the playlists? There should always be at least one hardcore mode in the playlists!