Drone Sector

This is a mixed review. I would still recommend that you buy the game and try it yourself because it's not a bad game, but there are critical flaws that need addressing. For the positives, the game is definitely the best at improving upon the classic Call of Duty 4 mission where you're in an AC-130 gunship. There are other games on Steam that also used this concept, and there's even an older mobile game ("Zombie Gunship") which was one of the first ones I've ever found that was able to emulate that Call of Duty 4 mission. Drone Sector is hands-down the best gunship game currently on the market by a mile. For the negatives, the first is very obvious and is currently the most-complained about topic: pathfinding. It's still clunky and often very frustrating to deal with, even after the recent updates that addresses it. I don't mean to put on my "armchair developer" hat on, but part of the problem definitely seems to stem from the fact that waypoints are "completed" a couple of distance units before the infantry/vehicle actually reaches it, so they start to turn before they are even capable of doing so (to round the corner of a building or to stay on the path surrounded by treelines), so then they try to course-correct and it gets messy and slow from here. It's a multi-problem issue, but I think that's one cause, but I'll let the developers figure that one out themselves. The second negative also has to do with your units on the ground: they are idiots, plain and simple. They are not warfighters by any means. They are no better than cannon fodder. The [b][u]ONLY EXCEPTION[/u][/b] is the .50Cal APC which, in the game's current state, you should fill all four of your squad slots with because they will decimate all enemy infantry in their sight. I am not kidding, every other unit type is effectively worthless. It's pretty wild that an AT squad will pretty much wipe to any enemy vehicle unit in the game (excluding anti-air), you would think that would be their specialty, but both infantry types are in a really, really miserable spot right now. The third negative is the predictive targeting is consistently off by just a smidgen. You have to aim JUST AHEAD of the prediction circle for your projectile to actually directly hit its mark (otherwise you undershoot it), and this is especially important when you're firing sabot. I'm not a military technology expert, but I would think this would be wildly unacceptable and outright rejected by the top military brass if we were to arm our fighter/attack jets with this technology in this state. The fourth negative is how taxed your resources get. It doesn't make ANY sense that the only means of accumulating resources is by completing missions which reward those resources. How did we even make this drone project to begin with? My suggestion would be to have the game give the player a passive income of base resources (dense material and explosive material, possibly others too, like optics materials), then offer mission types which upgrades that passive income. This would give the player a huge "opportunity cost" choice: do I play Mission A to get a big lump sum of resources, or do I play Mission B to improve my infrastructure? Because of the lack of passive income and how your ground forces fight, I'm forced into a strategy of using my sabot ammo to wipe all enemy vehicles in the map, THEN move all four of my .50Cal APCs to handle the infantry, all so I can preserve my explosive ammunition. This is hardly fun when the whole point of a gunship game is to unleash hellfire from above. It's only fine if you have to do it every once in a while, but you pretty much have to do it every other mission if you want to play the role as it was meant to be played, and you have to realize that it's an unsustainable strategy as the enemy awareness meter grows closer to 70% and above. The fifth negative is how useless smoke ammo is. You're hurting yourself more than you are helping when you use smoke, which makes you wonder why you would even bother unlocking it in the first place. If you can paint target boxes around all of the enemy units on the map with the corresponding drone upgrade, then your units should be capable of blindfiring through the smoke - hell, give me the opportunity to tell them where they should be aiming, that would be so much better than the current utility that smoke ammunition has. If you haven't surmised it yet, the issue with smoke is that - in its current state - it acts like a stasis field where allies and enemies don't shoot unless they are point-blank next to each other. This sounds nice for giving your ground forces some cover, but because of how bad ground forces are and how the glorious .50Cal APC is the only unit worth using, then putting up a smokescreen means your .50Cal APC isn't shredding enemy infantry units, which means you're wasting your own time when you use smoke. In actuality, the enemy units will randomly move, which means you flip a coin whether they will move into your unit and deal free damage to it (because vehicles have a minimum radius with which they can deal damage - get too close and they can't attack it). The sixth negative is how there is no means of lowering the enemy awareness meter. This essentially turns the main gamemode into a roguelike - you have to get strong and wealthy in resources by the time you hit a given awareness amount or you're going to be in for a heap of trouble with no means of getting through this "noob filter" of sorts. This is especially bad for the "new player experience" as they wouldn't know about it until they get to this point and experience it themselves, they'd have to play better in their next newgame attempt (again, very roguelike-esque). It would be really, really nice if the game offered some rare mission types (possibly a researchable upgrade) that were based around taking the enemy back into the stone age by wiping out their assets such as wiping our their tank depots or ammo stockpiles, and this would in turn, rewind the clock. Since we're on this topic, it would also be nice to include some mission types that involved destroying their AA resources which would affect the next mission pulls (so that there would be no or next-to-no AA at the start for X number of missions). All-in-all, those are my critiques, but the game is still in a very malleable state and I know the developers have been listening keenly on the forums. I'm excited to see how they handle the player feedback and what they have in store for us in the future.