If
EatChildren is going to crosspost from the Firestorm impressions thread, then I sure as hell am as well!
It's easily the best looking BR game. No surprise there. BF is gorgeous in general and the map is close in visuals to regular MP. The actual Firestorm effect is fantastic.
Map is small though. And playercount is small. Why is BF a small feeling Battle Royale? BF should be huge. This should have been 128 players or more, and a bigger map. This feels less lively than Blackout.
Inventory system is terrible. It's awful to navigate on console, and maybe slightly better on PC... but not by much. If you don't agree, the first time you try to fix up a level 3 armor from broken where you are looting armor shards one at a time, you will know what I mean. Criterion should be embarrassed for shipping it this way. The only thing I like about the inventory in this game is that it only takes like 1/4 of your screen when fully opened.
The Fortnite style loot explosions and everything-off-the-ground style looting suck.
Being in a tank in solo is awful. AT weaponry is plentiful, unless someone is ridiculously careless they will sneak up on you. It seems like people aren't too quick to shoot you as you're in the animation leaving the vehicle but I think people are going to catch on to that. It was a little better in squads, but I think you're going to need infantry support. 2 guys in a tank probably isn't going to cut it.
Kill trades happen in solos... with just regular guns. Feels bad man. Also weird lack of team damage from bullets, but artillery strikes and nades have it. Half-assed and unnecessary. Everything should cause team damage. Not a fan of this trend of BRs without team damage. Dumbs the gameplay down too much.
Oh, the third person vehicle camera on console is terrible. It's snap-to-joystick-angle style. Really unfun to use and look at. On PC it's kind of like a normal camera but... needlessly floaty?
MMGs made it into Firestorm. They are awesome, I think I'm going to carry one every chance I get. Seems like the bipod was deploying about as well as it does in the base game after whatever patch fixed it. Lots of good boxes and buildings with windows to mount them. And of course you can Really fun.
I don't like the Fortnite style tiered weapons. And... is Kar98k with a... 3x scope as good as it gets for snipers? Really?
The way you pick your class at the start, even though classes don't matter in game... and then it levels up those classes in the normal game... like.. what? This part feels like an amateur mod. I assume the original squad-only vision of Firestorm actually incorporated a one-of-each mentality or something. Otherwise it doesn't add up.
It doesn't let you start up an X-man squad. Always fills to 4 people. I don't want to play with randoms. Apex forces a full team as well, but with the way that game plays with hero classes and respawns it's more justifiable than this.
Artillery and V1 are pretty cool. The building destruction is great fun in a BR environment.
The game has very little readability. What kind of armor is the guy I'm facing wearing? No clue, doesn't seem to make any visual difference. Does armor protect the head? It... seems to. But I'm not sure. You get a lot of +174 XP ARMOR BROKEN ENEMY DAMAGED bullshit text-vomit on your screen. In PUBG you can see what kind of armor you are facing, well depending on what they're wearing cosmetics-wise, but you can always see the level of helmet, which is the most critical thing in that game. Apex has intuitive color coded hitmarkers, and clear damage numbers, along with nice satisfying sound effects for when you break armor. In Blackout it is pretty as well, at the very least you can always tell when someone has level 3 on.
To the people who said man we need a AAA PUBG KIller... On PC this is not it. Nowhere near good enough, big enough, or deep enough. On console Blackout kind of already killed PUBG, at least FPP. TPP is alive and well, populated full of people with Gears of War related names.
This mode is late and lacks ambition. It will be fun for a while and fade away IMO.