I am editing my review after being somewhat fed up with the game.

This game has a couple problems, which I'm gonna try and detail, kind of like a "buyer's beware" sort of thing.

1. Casual isn't fun. The dev team, instead of making new maps, keeps reworking the old braindead funny haha maps where strategy was impossible, (e.g. the old house map, too small to do sweat strats and was fun to play) making the casual playlist a sweatfest. You'll have people in prone underneath desks and sh*t and the 5 stacks playing with more coordination than an actual swat team performing a drug bust on El Chapo himself. That, or the enemy team is so unbelievably braindead that once you have a modicum of skill, you instantly curbstomp them so hard that they start calling you a series of expletives and whatnot, which brings me to point 2.

2. Toxic community. This game used to have a vote to kick option. My IGN is Toxissico (search my mediocre stats online if you want) so I used to get instakicked upon joining casual games for it. They then removed vote to kick, which just made a-holes more bold. You'll have squads going out of their way to teamkill you every single ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ round in casual, and there's nothing you can do to remove them from the game. It's either you leave, or stay and deal with the spewing of racial slurs in the voice chat. I have been sexually harassed more than any of my female friends who play this game despite being a dude with a somewhat deep voice. It's enough to make me question the sexuality of the average siege player.

This sh*t is so bad that, if you are a new player, I think you should AVOID the newcomer's playlist. This playlist is filled with "smurfs" that rebuy the game and bully newer players with their competitive level skills for youtube content. You will spawn in on the attacking team, walk 1 footstep, and instantly die because they punched out a window you didnt know existed because you just started playing.

Finally: point 3

3. Ranked/Unranked playlist. Unranked is basically casual except you have to suffer with dumb teammates for upwards of 45 minutes who do all the slurs, teamkilling, etc. for like 5+ rounds if you're unlucky. Then, you get the other problem of the enemy team having a squad of players that vastly outskill everyone on your team and instantly sh*t on you, making the practice useless. Now, moving on to actual ranked, your teammates probably won't tell you to kill yourself or call you a slur, and intentional TKs happen less frequently, but on average you will either do horrible due to 0 communication from people that only turn on mic to complain how bad you and everyone else is, OOOOOORRRRR they speak but play extremely poorly/not as a team, so you get sh*t on by the aforementioned El Chapo drug bust milsim larp raid f*$#ers I was talking about.

I know I said 3 was the final point, but I decided to ♥♥♥♥♥ and moan some more because I'm an insufferable and entitled GAMER.

The dev team picked up this real cool habit of balancing GUNS based off of how much certain operators are picked for their UNIQUE GADGET at high level ranked and proleague. Imagine as a new player, you buy Ash, a cheap, base game operator and decided to use the R4c since it has higher firerate and damage, but lower zoom to compensate. This is a mistake, because after every bullet you fire, a magical ninja pops out of a bush and bicycle kicks your gun around to ensure it's uncontrollable, all because some dude who you've never met got a little too good with this operator and picked her to try and win rounds.

Also, people complain about anticheat being sh*t and not banning ppl, but I'm not even gonna delve into that. (Not enough space in the review for this topic.) Mostly gonna call out the devs on their inadequacy with handling weapon/operator balancing in a "strategic shooter" in which they refuse to adjust the strategic elements of characters.

So you may be thinking, "Man, so what if they nerfed a couple of the attacking operator's guns? Aren't you just being a ♥♥♥♥♥? Sure, every single popular operator's loadout got nerfed in some way recently, but maybe shut the ♥♥♥♥ up?

Yes, hypothetical person, you are right. This review has turned into a rant and I am being a massive ♥♥♥♥♥. However, the reason I am being a massive ♥♥♥♥♥ is because these gun nerfs are happening on ATTACK, the side that, on average, is harder to win with and less fun to play. This is because all of their guns have actual recoil in comparison to the defending team, along with lower firerate. This means that you have to put in effort to try and get headshots sometimes, while defenders just wave their 800-900 rpm laserbeam around and instantly kill you no effort at all. Additionally, the defending team has this disgusting issue of "trap operators." These operators slap some sh*t on a door that plays the game for them.

For example, this dude called Kapkan can slap IED traps on a door at ankle level that blow up and hurt you. They buffed this so that he can put more than 1 on and INSTANTLY ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ KILL YOU! This means that, even in casual, if I don't spend at least 10+ seconds checking every doorway, I may explode and die instantly.

Then you have one called Ela. She can toss concussive mines wherever she wants. This means that you could walk through a door, trigger this concussive mine, be unable to see since it blinds you AND removes your hearing WHILE slowing you. They give this hilarious operator an SMG that fires bullets faster than the interest on my student loans can increase, with her other option being a shotgun that is also an smg sniperrifle assault rifle because it instantly kills you from like any distance at all ever, which is easy to do if your target is blind deaf and slow. I don't know how an operator that turns you into Helen Keller was considered good operator design, but go off Ubisoft.

You also got Melusi. She places some bullsh*t on the floor that makes a super ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ loud noise, is bulletproof, AND SLOWS YOU. So you can't shoot it until an entire second passes and it "opens up" exposing the destroyable weakpoint. It seems balanced until you realize that, while this is happening, any defender in the game can just walk up to your crippled ass and instakill you the second you take out the "banshee" as it's called.

You got this lady called frost with bear traps. If you're vaulting a window/shield and don't instantly look straight down to shoot out the floor, you instantly die to a bear trap. While you are taking out this bear trap, any person with 3 braincells or more can just shoot you, making this an unwinnable encounter if you can't take it out from far away. Also, if your shoe lace touches it, the trap triggers and kills you anyways.

Then, there's this super cool character EVERYONE likes called Clash. She has a giant shield that is portable and bulletproof. This shield comes equipped with a taser that slows you AND kills you. So you can't run away that well because of the slow, and if you don't you die. Very epic.

So, what is the takeaway of this giant wall of text?

It's that Ubisoft keeps nerfing attacking guns on popular operators while most of the highly picked defenders have gadgets that activate automatically and play the game for them, either by instantly killing you, or taking away your ability to see, hear, and move. This has the cool effect of turning you into free target practice in a game with oneshot headshots for some dude with a gun that is incapable of kicking upwards due to it being a defender weapon.

Oh, I forgot to mention. Most of the operators that received these gun nerfs had grenades or some way to clear traps from far away. So they actively are trying to stop players from picking the characters that COULD deal with these cringe unique gadgets from far away. 10/10

TL;DR: I'm salty. Stop nerfing sh*t on the team that actually has to play the game. Bad community also. But hey, cool sandbox "milsim" to play with friends.