TL;DR - wait 2 to 3 more years before you buy this game, or at least until fatshark decides to address these issues.
I want to start this review by saying that I love this game. I've run hundreds and thousands of auric level mission, I've maxed out the levels of both base and DLC classes, I was even there when you only get one talent point for every 5 levels, when the weapon system overhaul was implemented, and even when the penance system was introduced. I've powered through all the bullsh*t for more than 3 years and over, thinking "fatshark will fix this soon," They didn't. Many aspect of the game has improved over the years, but it does not excuse them for doing a poor management of addressing these issues for this long:
>unbalanced engagement - by far my biggest gripe about the game. The game presents you with a TON of weapons for you to play with for both ranged and melee options, and yet 80% of said weapons will never see daylight because fatshark decided that spamming armoured enemies is the definition of hard: there are many types of enemies present in the game: unarmoured, unyielding, maniac, flak and carapace makes up most of the priority enemies that the game will throw at you. Some weapon are better at dealing with certain types of enemies, and are weaker at handling other types of enemies compared to the other weapons at your disposal. However, this wouldn't have been an issue if CARAPACE type enemies wasn't so prominent/oppresive in the game; carapace type enemies usually have some parts if not all of their body to be covered in heavy plate armour, and these armours can only be bypassed through a handful of weapons, while the rest of the weapon will LITTERALY bounce off from making contact with the armour. And since the game will spam these guys at you at higher levels, bringing a non-carapace weapon for both your melee and ranged slot will often means you kiting those ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ continuously while slowly chipping away at their health, or praying for a teammate to help you. They said that they have reduced the number of carapace armour enemies, but with anti-armour weapons nerfs and carapace enemies still spawn in droves, I do not feel that much difference in engagement.
>audio issues - my second biggest gripe of this game, right above network and connectivity issues. Audio cue plays an essential role in this game; melee and/or ranged attacks of enemies are announced with a unique audio cue to tell you when an attack is directed towards you, and all specialist and elite enemies will have a unique audio cue that plays out whenever they're present on the field and when they're going to attack. so be it during ranged or melee combat, you can have time to react to their attacks even if you can't see them. The problem arises when these cues failed to play out before the enemy's attack: when enough enemy spawn and/or alive in the area that you're team are currently in, some audio will fail to play out correctly, or not play out at all. The amount of times I got blown up by a poxbursters because I didn't hear it's ticking amongst the horde, or the times I got downed from a silent trapper, dog or sniper have probably made up more than 50% of my total deaths.
>enemies spawning behind you - and no, this is not because I didn't check my surroundings or because I was standing near their spawn door: You could be in the middle of an open field - no spawn doors in sight and in between your teammates - and saw a horde coming your way. You pulled out your ranged weapon to pick them off and all of the sudden you get hit in the back. You turn around and see some SMUCKS just spawned from THIN-F*CKIN-AIR, RIGHT BETWEEN YOUR BACK AND YOUR TEAMATES, just to hit you. This is where some people would say "git gud" but in my honest opinion, it just makes any engagement more of a chore than anything: spawning enemies behind player doesn't add challenge to the game, but instead it punishes player for not playing like a spazzed-out crackhead. It's a cheap way of adding unnecessary tension to an already brutal combat, and it just makes any fight more frustrating than rewarding. In the higher levels, a singular horde mob only needs a couple of swings to down you. That's why damage reduction and toughness nodes are so important to any operatives. But because of these guys could spawn behind your character at any given time, they can whittle you down by stacking unnecessary damage onto your toughness and health, which opens you up to other attacks. They also body block your operatives (excluding ogryn) since enemy collision is a thing, so when you're trying to make some space between you and that wall of crushers heading towards you, don't be surprised when all of the sudden you just stopped moving.
All of this without mentioning the jankiness of some elites/specialist enemies, a big file size of nearly 100GBs, predatory microtransaction store that they refuse to do anything about even with many players asking it to be removed, long gaps between updates, the game chugging from time to time, ranged and melee hits sometimes just won't register, silent footsteps for enemies that aren't SUPPOSED to be silent, lazy event rewards which are nothing more than fancy picture frames, crashing, disconnecting and a myriad of other issues that continues to stack up with one another.
This game have so much potential to be a really great horde shooter, and it is disheartening to see it being handled as so. Especially when one of their older game "vermintide 2" have fixed or even somewhat addressed much of the issues mentioned. I don't know why those system aren't implemented into this game but until then, if you decide to buy this game still, you'll have to bear it until god knows when.
