You can do a lot better for $40.
www.pcgamer.com
Agree with most of the article. Unfortunately.
The community is surprisingly chill and politics in game lobbies are actually kept to a minimum. The Steam forums are a dumpster fire but that's pretty much every single game.
They released the game in a state that completely invalidates the nuanced approach they advertised to the events. At the moment it's nothing more than a foundation for awesome tactics with a steep price tag apparently designed to weed out some of the ghoulish clowns.
This game could've dropped the Fallujah name and avoid the bad press but they stuck to it, creating expectations of intent....which have been mostly squandered for the moment, and from my experience with tac shooters and milsims, the only thing preventing an army of chuds from descending on the game is that they're unwilling to pay 40$ for 4 missions.
To be honest I don't really care about the name of this game anymore than I care to play Call of Duty (press F to ruin a virtual funeral, no russian, etc) or care about the politics of Arma 3 or whether or not the devs of Squad thought about inhumane weaponry while designing their own rendition of Fallujah, which did not cause no uproar. If I realize my lobby is full of unsavory individuals who pull me out of the experience I join another one.
However they made the choice to reap some interest by reviving a contentious dead name, so if you are going to slant your concept in that direction, I will be expecting something that I have not seen since Spec Ops : The Line without breaking the fourth wall. Is that easy to do? No. But you put yourself in that situation now it's time to deliver and the current state of your product, although early access, does not bode well for your overall PR legitimacy.
Maybe a future update will finally integrate the other side of the coin, but at that point in time it's going to come across as the afterthought everyone is suspecting, and you are also going to piss off a sizeable chunk of your community who bought it for the tactics but also in part to make a point about "pWnIg tEh libslolz" based on the first available build. My glee for the community cleanup will be hard to conceal but my hopes are low.
TLDR Game is good but devs stuck themselves between a rock and a hard place because for all the defensive PR they did, none of the supposed "nuance" is there at the moment.
