Hello. I have about 84 hours in matches (according to the achievement anyway) and am here to give my overall impression of the game and what I think needs improvement.
Review:
Overall, I like this game. Wouldn’t have put so many hours into it everyday otherwise. The stuff you have to pay to get is either not powerful enough to think “that guy used a credit card” or there is some kind of campaign level matchmaking and I am still low enough to play with other F2P players (currently at campaign lvl 20). Maps variety is good and several different environment types if you change your campaign often. Different weapons feel good and ground combat is a blast both in and out of a tank. While skill lets me play viably with low ranking soldiers, using a maxed out soldier with similar equipment feels better and gives me a solid reason to grind up a few top-tier people to use.
Suggestions:
Air Combat - issues:
The current black stain in the game. Its pretty messy and needs a lot of attention. Currently ground AA does basically nothing and Air to Air combat is mostly fun but entirely unrewarding XP wise. Bombing is useful, and if done right very effective, but very boring to basically “wait” about a minute between bombing runs to just fly back.
Plane HP seems to only have 3 states at the moment, and it switches between them instantly.
Full HP - You are either pristine or nicked, and there is no difference.
Some Damage - Plane loses any real ability to keep flying. Maybe you can do some loops and not crash, but any air combat/bombing is out of the question.
Bricked - No if ands or buts, you will meet the ground in about 10-60 seconds.
Perhaps a personal issue, but I have no idea of where exactly my bombs land unless I dive-bomb. I do general runs and hope I get lucky, but unless I dive-bomb it always feels like I am off target and am lucky to hit 2-4 people.
Air Combat-suggestions:
Buff ground AA and give taking down a plane a LOT more XP.
Have Plane HP be far more responsive for the pilot. I have to dump 50-100 rounds of direct hits to take out an enemy plane, but it always feels like they either missed me completely or shot me down after 5 bullets hit me.
Give Pilots the ability to equip parachutes. I would be far less frustrated with my plane being functional but useless in the air if it didn’t feel I get the most out of my time by flying straight into the ground so I can do something other then hobble. A parachute gives even bricked pilots a chance to dive out and perhaps do some Rambo style combat from behind enemy lines. It would at least help justify the combat perks that are randomly rolled that have nothing to do with planes.
Let planes leave the area instead of re-arming. Instead of magically getting more bombs mid-air, have planes leave and “return to base”, they cannot leave if they have taken damage in the last 10 seconds. It rotates out pilots faster and prevents 1 person from spending the entire game racking up 200 bombing kills. Penalize players who’s plane gets destroyed by adding additional rotations for the plane before they can spawn it again.
I will address my accuracy with bombing with the Practice suggestion.
Engineer-issues:
Currently I only use my engineer to slap down a respawn point, or throw down barbed wire if I am defending an invasion. I like the AA and anti-tank options they can build, but its not nice enough to give up the other benefits of using other squads instead of the engineering one. Everyone carries a grenade and sandbags get bombed out far far too easily. Only under very specific conditions do I even touch Anti-Tank Spikes.
Engineer-suggestion:
Give all engineers the ability to make AA, but give them far less ammo for being outside the engineer squad(20 rounds at most). Make sandbags a bit more study vs random explosives but let players who reach and dismantle emplaced defensive do it faster. Make tank spikes faster to build and give a higher maximum amount so a devious engineer can really shut down alternative pathways for tanks who have no infantry support. Spawn points need to have their noise amplified, 99% of the time I can only tell when the enemy has a spawn point set up because of the troops that “hop” into existence.
Inventory Management-issue:
This isn’t a big one, but somewhat irritating. Mainly just some QoL improvement needed for messing around between matches.
Inventory Management-suggestions:
Add some sorting to soldiers when managing them(class, stars, rank, ect). Release soldiers from squads not in use (no more 30+ 1 star troopers to fill up unused squads). Give the option to use multiple supply/troop reinforcements at once (I have about 100 bronze supply and 200 troop. Mainly because its frustrating to hit the same button repeatedly). Let us dismantle all of X gun at Y stars (Same as last suggestion basically. It seems pointless to have to individually dismantle my 8 1-star M1 Grands). I would like some kind of option to promote soldiers to the next rank so I don’t feel like I need to dismiss tons of troops once my campaign hits a certain level. (I threw out all of my old snipers once I unlocked sniper 2. Seems like a waste.)
Practice Field-suggestions:
No issues, only room for improvement.
Add additional UI Hud elements in a obviously wrong color to help train people in how specific things work. (For example. When using a sniper, have a few targets at distance move back and forth. When using the scope you get a neon purple dot that marks exactly where you should be shooting to hit the target at that distance, both for bullet drop and about where the target will be for walking/sprinting). It should be made very obvious that these additional HUD elements will NOT be in the game outside of practice. This can extend to tanks (showing weak points in enemy tanks) and planes (where bombs will land).
Let you change between ALL unlocked squads. So you do not need to keep hoping in and out of practice to experiment with different soldiers. (This is mainly because you cannot have both a plane and tank squad at the same time)
Miscellaneous-suggestion:
Please, PLEASE give better details on key binds. It was very frustrating even in practice mode to figure out the differences of each key and how to properly bind them so they do not interfere with each other. Also have combo keys not interact with non-combo bound keys. (I have my change range increment bound to RMB + scroll wheel. I had to unbind weapon swap as it did both despite weapon swap using only scroll wheel.)