Christ, where to begin.
I know a billion people have already said this, but i think it needs said again. Berlin sucks. Hard.
Berlin sucks for a variety of reasons, most of which play into one another. I’m going to start with the broadest topics and work my way down, i think.
Map Design
Berlin’s urban maps are honestly fantastic. Visually that is. The sprawling and ruined hulks of buildings, twisted rebar, and mounds of rubble are daunting to look at and give combat an interesting 3D feel.
But things don’t always play out so nicely. Visually impressive though they may be, at the core of the matter, most of Berlin’s maps are very flawed from a gameplay standpoint. In the invasion gamemode, on all maps besides Lehrter-Bahnhoff, the attackers are placed fairly near the point, and the defenders have difficulty reaching it before it’s already mostly or completely captured. In general, points are close enough together that defenders have little to no time to set up defenses, rallies, or AT guns before they’re overrun by attackers. In essentia, you have to forfeit the previous point if you want to have enough time for a proper defense.
On a smaller scale: Maps are very very close-quarters, for both tanks and infantry. For tanks, the streets are difficult to navigate, especially backwards, and there is an incredible amount of wreckage and trash with dodgy hitboxes that block vision, and worse, stop shells unexpectedly. Maps force defending tanks, almost always pz. IVs to slowly reverse, as approaching t-34s take their time to line up shots on the destablized vehicle. Worse still, the maps almost always remove the sole advantage of the pz. IV, that being its excellent optical zoom. Forcing the pz. IV, with a hand-cranked turret and high-zoom sights into close quarters duels with T-34s having powered turrets and exclusively close-range optics is hardly thoughtful design.
For infantry, allies are heavily favoured, with a wide range of accurate, high ROF submachineguns, semi-automatic rifles, and machineguns. 1-2 soldiers with PPDs or PPS submachineguns can often wipe an entire squad without the axis player being able to do a thing about it. I personally have been sprayed with 7.62 which killed me in the split second between me clicking and my gun firing on many occasions.
Bugs
Berlin so far has been plagued with bugs and issues, many of them surrounding vehicle combat and spawns. The T-34 is a pretty good example, having multiple bugs associated with it. For example, the turret direction bug at range. Beyond a certain range, T-34 turrets will appear to be facing in strange, nonsensical directions, such as backwards or away from the direction of enemy tanks. Your damage indicator will imply the same thing, glowing bright green to let you know that, yes, this turret IS turned away from you. However, despite the indicator and your own eyes, the turret is facing directly at you.
Damage models for the 34-85 are similarly broken, turning what should be a 1-2 shot engagement with a fairly equal foe into a slugging match with a nigh-impenetrable green fortress. T-34 aside, there are bugs with tanks getting caught on nothing, spawning in the middle of things when another tank is in their spawn area, collision issues, you name it.
Optimization seems wanting as well, with berlin demanding more resources (for my computer at least) than other campaigns. Crashes on berlin aren’t uncommon, whereas I’ve never had one happen on another campaign.
Vehicle and Weapon Choices
This is one where i can kinda see what the devs were going for? It seems like they wanted to capture the slapdash and bizarre-feeling ersatz and last-ditch weaponry of the volkssturm units present historically. The problem is that once again, the devs have failed to reach a balance between, well, balance and history. In my own personal experience, the ersatz weapons past starters are not very impressive, with me gravitating back to standard weapons over time.
Axis SMGs are slow and easily overwhelmed by allied counterparts, axis rifles are nothing to write home about, and the starter tank matchups are silly. The allies start with a tank that’s intended to have a fighting chance against tigers, with close-range optics and a powered turret, against a tank that has no powered drive, high-zoom optics, a pitiful reverse, and flat armor. Even the gun on a standard t-34 can frontally penetrate a pz. IV J with APCR rounds. I’d say the only real advantage the Pz. IV has is the MG34 machinegun.
Allies get captured axis gear for lack of self-produced equivalents, but axis don’t use captured allied kit, despite it being very common historically. Letting axis troops have things like re-issued allied SMGs and machineguns would be a good way to possibly rebalance things.
Conclusion
Berlin, if given the right amount of care and work, could very possibly be the best campaign so far in enlisted. However, at the moment it has to be my least favorite of the three. It’s unbalanced, it’s buggy, lots of the decisions just don’t make sense, and it’s poorly optimized. For how long berlin was in closed testing, you’d think the devs would have an idea what to do about it. The whole campaign feels like it was smashed together with no thought behind what those choices would mean for the actual gameplay.
In short: Balance berlin, make new maps, fix current maps, fix tanks, rethink the invasion gamemode, and at least try to balance small arms?