This review comes from a place of love for tactical shooters, as it's easily my most played genre over the last nearly 20 years.
Ground Branch is simply not worth your time, money, or interest. Period.
I can't even give it the old "it has good bones!", or "it's got potential!", because it's been in development for damn near 8 years and the potential was squandered about 2 years ago.
-The movement is both janky and floaty. I'm able to clip my head into doors at mach 5 to peek into the other side with 0 repercussions, and you can speed clear levels solo with almost 0 effort. Just set run to toggle and fly past doorways while shoot and scootin like John Wick
-The gunplay is so incredibly unsatisfying and flat in every area; sound is bland and lacks diversity, visuals are lackluster and combat feedback is nonexistent. Some of the most unrealistic weapon handling I've felt in a long time. Y'all ever fired a .300blk? Doesn't feel like whatever this is.
-Gun sway in optics is absolutely ABSURD. Can't keep my STOCK mp5 level for more than 3 seconds? A new shooter, let alone a seasoned vet, should and [i]could[/i] easily handle most SMGs, carbines and rifles better than your character can. No matter how long you hold your weapon in high or low ready, and no matter what speed or position I'm in, the weapon sways like a flag in the wind.
-The game looks seriously bad for being released in the year of our lord, current year. Don't even get me started on the faces.
-I understand what they were doing with the NOD zoom, and the NODs do look good in general, but the way it's executed here just screams motion sickness.
-The AI is still braindead and boring. Shoot them a few times, they run into cover. Wait about a minute, they forget you ever existed and walk back out as calm as ever. Rinse, repeat, until they're dead. No flanking, no comms, no info share, nothing.
-The UI is still absolutely tragic in every aspect and the UI designer needs to seriously step their game up or look for a new line of work. It's anemic, just like the gameplay, so at least it matches I suppose.
-There is ZERO atmosphere in this game. The lighting in levels is boring, the ambiance is whatever if you even notice it, and there's no panache or pizazz to the art direction or audio for levels. I've seen more dynamic environs in Arma 2.
Really, the only things this game has going for it is the wonderful performance (at least on my 2 machines) and the co-op campaign, which still isn't great because of the overall package.
If this is 1.0 after 8 YEARS of development, then it's far too late. v1033 was at the very least more fun, and that's rough considering how bad it was. It's a damn shame, but this just straight up isn't fun. Having played Operator for just 1 hour, it was incredible and immediate just how different and how much better the game felt, looked, sounded, and played overall. Mind you, Operator is still in early access, so they could absolutely blow it just like BlackFoot & MicroProse did here, but the bones for Operator are already infinitely better in every single way aside from performance.
If you want fun CQB co-op that can be hardcore or casual > Ready or Not
If you want fun hardcore operator style gameplay in co-op or pvp > Operator
I'll continue to try it out here and there, but unless post 1.0 gets a massive and near total rework/rewrite (again), Ground Branch has never been, and will never [i]be[/i], good. And that sucks because it absolutely could be :\
