Fine with being a contrarian here, this game is pretty solid now. There's still TTK and weapon balancing issues, but it's a pretty solid experience nowadays. The main thing is just that guns feel like laser pointers in this game more than any Battlefield before, especially assault rifles that still shoot straight from a 100m range.

The item shop is still kind of jarring of course, along with Battle Passes and the whole shebang. That's sort of outside the game for me though, since it's all cosmetic.

I will say, when people say this game "isn't Battlefield" it seems quite asinine to me, because there are plenty of series that have tried to "experiment" (or in this case, the development team was comprised of people who previously worked on Call of Duty) and still deliver a decent product that exists in the universe of previous installments while having notable differences. The series name is more of a brand than anything else, and when I read Battlefield I expect a large-scale FPS with vehicles and the conquest mode, which this game has had since launch.

Of course, the launch of this game was pretty catastrophic, but frankly we can still be critical of the practice of launching an unfinished game and resist buying said game, then when the game is actually polished, purchase the game. I really don't think anyone should be pre-ordering games or buying them on launch day anymore because of these practices, and we should be rewarding developers when they actually get their shit together (ie. No Man's Sky). This seems like what good consumer practice is, rather than just having blind hatred for any company that desecrates your series by releasing a subpar game at launch.

As if BFV was much better. But people will cope and say that game was good and 2042 is trash. Rose-tinted glasses as always.

Sorry for the rant.

I've been thinking a lot about why my opinion of Dead Cells has degraded over time, and ultimately it boils down to an immense amount of design conflict.

- There are many interesting areas in this game, but the most interesting are simultaneously the most annoying and tedious to get through, mostly based on the enemy design.

- The game simultaneously seems to point the player toward speedrunning the game and taking it slowly to look through every crevice for loot. You'd think going faster would be better, but all signs point to looting everything being the better approach. If you go quickly, you get to open doors that contain loot. If you go slowly, you miss out on those doors, but you end up more powerful as a whole from picking up every stat boost and hitting every store.

- Another point about game speed, slow weapons seem to be much worse than fast weapons due to the amount of hitstun you can apply. The only way you can use slow weapons effectively is by pairing it with a shield and parrying every single attack, or taking a freezing weapon, which also seem insanely good in any build.

- Enemy design, time after time, slows the pace of the game down. Enemies that damage you when you hit their back, enemies that shoot projectiles through the floor at you, enemies that damage a substantial AoE around them, enemies that hook you to them, etc.

I dunno. I'm open to hearing people's thoughts about this but as of right now (at 2BC) it seems like the game is sluggish to play most of the time. I'm sure if I played the game at the base difficulty again I would have a blast, but at this point it's just kind of tedious to play.

The things that make Overwatch work are still here, but the things that make Overwatch not work as smoothly as it could are also still here, giving credence to the typical reaction of "it's just the same game."

It is the same game, and the addition of "2" to the title only signifies a shift to a significantly worse progression system which implements the worst aspects of F2P games and microtransactions as a whole without implementing some of the countermeasures that still make progression in those same F2P games fun. The abolition of the career level (effectively), the removal of earning skins via lootboxes (even if not ideal), and the lack of any sort of progression aside from the battle pass leaves a empty gap for those who like to watch numbers go up. The simple addition of character levels akin to any Hi-Rez game with the ability to earn skins for that specific character would remedy this problem entirely.

I can't speak for balance entirely, but it certainly also does seem like certain characters outshine others, and certain characters outright harm the experience. I honestly can't rag on this too much though, because this is going to be the case in any game that has a hero system ever, the likelihood is that this game will still be following the same pattern of meta-shifting as every other competitive multiplayer game.

Hopefully the PvE update (whenever it comes) will be good enough to justify this marketing gimmick of a faux-sequel that removes more content than it adds, but nonetheless it's still a semi-competent game.