Recent reviews by Swiftcore

If you're expecting tactical depth and replayability, Carrier Command 2 might not be the game for you. The combined arms aspect of the game falls short with ground combat feeling like an afterthought. Air power will clear out islands much faster with far less risk, so ground units are really only suited for mopping up.

The central game loop is very repetitive. You pick an island, you sail to it, you launch an observation drone to spot everything on the island, you bomb everything into scrap and then send in ground forces to mop up. The game is very slow paced, with travel times between islands being long and launching and recovering ground vehicles generally being a very slow process.

CC2 has it's moments though. Standing on the deck, watching the blinking taillights of your aircraft disappear into the fog. Alarms blaring in the control tower while you desperately maneuver your carrier to avoid incoming torpedoes. Lining up for the perfect gun run and watching explosions light up the night. The game's got great atmosphere.

Your enjoyment of CC2 probably hinges on the fact of weather you're able to appreciate the slow pace and if you're able to set aside the most efficient strategy to make your own fun. Transit between islands can be long, but with a show on your second monitor it can be a very relaxing experience. Make sure you stay on top of logistics and anticipate what materials you'll need. If you plan ahead, downtime can be minimized.

There are many tools available to you, but you could probably win the game with just torpedoes, naval artillery, and a spotting drone. If you always rely on the most effective tool at your disposal, you'll get bored very quickly. The game has a lot of different vehicles and weapons to choose from, make sure to switch it up to keep things interesting.

TLDR: CC2 is a slow paced game with a repetitive gameplay loop. If you can mitigate these shortcomings through careful planning and by varying your tactics, you'll have a good time. Always stay stocked up on fuel and go easy on the naval artillery.

Squad is taking a new direction with it's newest update, and it's making a lot of people upset for an understandable reason: the developers didn't know what they wanted their game to be. Let me start out by giving some context.

Squad was originally conceived as an offshoot of a Battlefield 2 mod called Project Reality. Project Reality was a mod based around making BF2 a more realistic, teamwork-based experience. The game had a slower pace, with some punishing mechanics that incentivized teamwork. The modders who worked on PR eventually went on to found Offworld Industries and started a kickstarter for their new game: Squad.

Squad was meant as a kind of spiritual successor to BF2, with a few caveats. Realistic aspects were still present, but they were sidelined in order to focus on the main draw of squad: teamwork. This is shown in how they advertised the game on kickstarter, using lines like "A soldier is nothing without their squad, a squad means nothing without is soldiers" to promote the game. Most of the people who originally funded the game on kickstarter were PR players, and the game was funded on the promise that it would eventually become something similar to PR.

Over the years, the squad developers made deliberate choices in order to make the game appeal to a wider audience. Movement was sped up, gunplay made smooth and accessible, and respawns were tweaked so the player could always get back into the action as quick as possible. This lead to a faster paced game, which lead to wider appeal. The game advertised itself as a teamwork based experience, but in reality, teamwork was becoming rarer and rarer as the developers made few changes to actually incentivize teamwork on a squad based level. Moving away from your squad to make aggressive solo flanks was rewarded more often than punished.

The game had an identity crisis. Older Project Reality veterans insisted the game was meant to be a slow paced, teamwork oriented game, while fans of faster paced FPS games liked the direction the game was going. After several free weekends, the game's community became even further confused, as the initial playerbase became outnumbered by a surge of new players. Nobody, including OWI, knew what squad was supposed to be.

And that leads us to the current state of the game. A few months ago, OWI announced that they were unsatisfied with the direction the game had taken. There was very little teamwork, squads were becoming spread out and uncoordinated, and players using voice chat to coordinate was becoming increasingly rare. The devs decided to return to more traditional PR style gameplay, and they announced that the first step in that process was overhauling the gunplay and movement.

This made a lot of the community very upset, because squad is moving away from what they thought the game was supposed to be. I can't really argue against this, since not even OWI knew what they wanted squad to be. I think they do have a right to be upset, but I personally believe that this decision by OWI was the right one to make.

There are many options for fast paced solo shooters on the market, slower paced games that really encourage teamwork oriented gameplay are vanishingly rare these days. After playing several playtests for the new update, I find the game to be far more compelling than it was previously. A game that has a vision behind it will always be better than a game that has an identity crisis. The game is less accessible now, and it's not going to appeal to everyone, but it's finally starting to fit into the niche it was originally envisioned for. There's still a long way to go, and this change of direction won't be accomplished with just the infantry combat overhaul, but at least the game has direction now.

TLDR: Squad had an identity crisis for a long time, which has only now been resolved. This has lead to significant fallout as the game is changing direction. If you're looking to buy squad to coordinate closely with others using tactical maneuvers, there's never been a better time to pick up the game. If you're looking a game where you can show off your twitch shooter skills you've picked up in other fast paced FPS games, or run around on your own, you might want to look elsewhere. Those skills will still translate, but they're no longer the defining factor that decides who wins and who loses a firefight.

They're trying to develop a game set in WW1, WW2, Vietnam, and the 1990s; and they're developing all those theaters simultaneously. If you can't figure out why this would be an issue, look at every other successful multi-theater FPS out there: they started with a single theater and time period, fleshed out the gameplay, released a compete product, and then added on from there. They're also releasing 3 of those theaters as paid DLC, with preorders available before the base game is even finished. This is not a red flag, this is a huge blinking neon sign telling you to stay the ♥♥♥♥ away.

This is not a project reality successor, bluedrake has no idea how to develop a game and I doubt he even understands the concepts that made PR work in the first place. Spend your money elsewhere.

Less teamwork than hell let loose (which is really saying something) and a playerbase that's on life support. Yet another studio that hasn't taken lessons from red orchestra 2 and project reality, leaving the teamwork based gameplay sorely lacking. Hopefully someday soon these game studios will realize that you need to do more to encourage teamwork than stick people in a squad and assume they'll work together.

Fantastic game with excellent atmosphere and compelling gameplay.

An amazing soundtrack with a pretty good dogfighting minigame attached to it.

Really solid free game with great gunplay and a really fun destructible voxel setting. What's not to love?

10/10 would die to dumb ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ again

Hands down the best tactical simulation game on the market; there's a reason this game is used by professional militaries as a training tool. If you're interested in seeing how real armies conduct mechanized operations, I highly recommend you give this game a try.

The price is a bit steep since it's a niche title, but there's a free demo available on the developer's website if you'd like to try it out before purchasing.

Would have recommended this game at launch, unfortunately the developers have made significant changes to the progression system and gameplay, and the community is a far cry from what it once was. When the game released, the developers ensured the class system kept a pretty historically accurate ratio of rifles to automatic weapons. Now nearly every class has an option to get an automatic weapon if you grind enough. Also, locking stuff like building AT guns behind the horrendous grind isn't super appealing, especially when they were available to every AT class at launch.

The community is also pretty different now, developers have made few attempts to encourage teamwork. The end result is a community that barely communicates, most don't even use their mics. At this stage of development I really wouldn't recommend if you're looking for a realistic, teamwork focused experience.