News - Warzone Update Review (the Good Stuff)
This isn't always a good thing; we'll talk about this a little bit in the bad article, but generally speaking, what that means is that it's really dense, really urban; there's a huge focus on verticality; there's a lot of floors to the buildings; there's a lot of interesting stuff to do; there's a lot of places to explore; there's a lot of basement areas; it's very, very dense; it reminds me of almost cyberpunk in a way; there's a wide variety of vehicles at launch; it's really easy to navigate the zip lines.
I think that you can get up to really tall buildings really quickly with cranes and stuff like that. The design here is to push people together closer; the strongholds don't open until later, so you're fighting more consistently, a little bit, maybe more, like you're just constantly going at it, and it rewards aggressive players, which is usually a good thing, and it also results in slightly shorter matches, which is also probably a good thing.
Sometimes war zone matches would go on for a little bit too long, so when it comes to weapons and fighting mechanics, there is an astonishing weapon variety at launch. Not only do we have the ton of guns from Modern Warfare 3, we also have all of the ones from Modern Warfare 2, all of their various conversion kits and attachments, and their blueprints and stuff like that, so there's a ton of different things you can play with thanks to the carryover and the integrations.
You just launch with tons and tons of options, and after all of that, the ground loot ain't bad either. The ground loot is better in this game than it is in a lot of Battle Royale, so I'm quite happy with it. There is a huge variety of tactical lethals, streaks, equipment, and stuff like this, so you can play the game in a lot of different ways, and in its early phases, at least everything is relatively usable.
A lot of people love the smoke grenades. There's even a perk that makes a smoke just poof right out of you when you die. I probably should have been using that, and there are very few horrible weapons in the war zone; almost all of them are useful. Currently, meta-suppressors are dominant because they keep you off the radar, but not exclusively.
So even though the 30-round spam shotgun is surprisingly viable, sniper rifles are in a good place again; they have high muzzle velocity, and some of the more popular ones can one-shot, so sniping feels very good, and I'm overall really happy with the variety of choices that I have to play this game because not all battle royals allow you to sometimes you kind of end up being forced to do the meta or do nothing.
Continuing with our discussion of weapons, recoils are a little bit all over the place, but I think a lot of that has to do with weapon kitting. There's a lot of very good ability; generally speaking, bullet velocity is easier to boost and more forgiving in this war zone update than it has been in previous games, so the guns feel a little bit more like hit scans and a little bit less like pellet launchers.
My guns generally feel satisfying to shoot, but gunfights are a little inconsistent. I don't know if this is a personal problem or a balance problem. My personal suspicion is that it has to do with the new body multipliers; the war zone has multipliers for the gut and stomach, chest, upper chest, test, and neck, and they've all got different values and stuff, so depending on where people hit you, you can die a lot faster with certain weapons, so moving along loads of operator variety because the store is already open, so day one we've already got Skeletor, you know, we've got He-Man and Homelander, and anime cat girls and crazy stuff like that, which I'm totally here for.
I know the milsim guys hate it, but I love it, and I really like the outro cinematic. I am really tired of being the dead weight, but I'm glad that they added that feature; it's a very funny feature. We could use a few more things like that, so moving down the list of good things that I have here Buy stations and other points of interest seem relatively prevalent, which is good.
You're never too far out of combat; you don't land in a completely empty, dry zone. Even in the slower areas of the map, there's definitely still stuff to do; there are places to go; there are things to unlock; there's ways to get your gear back; buying teammates back is cheaper; or you can get Goog tokens.
It's pretty easy to buy your loadouts. You already have mobile loadouts, so you've got a lower cost. You have so much stuff you can buy, so as long as you find a little bit of money, you can recoup it really quickly, and I kind of like that; it kind of keeps me. With the weapons that I want, when you redeploy from Google, you take some of those with you.
I'm all here for it, and another thing that's been really good for me, and this isn't actually part of the sponsor segment of the article, is that my PC performance has been nothing less than excellent. Now your mileage may vary, and your experience may be way better with a 40 series Nvidia GPU like the 4090.
I captured at least some of the gameplay here today, so that's the way I would recommend going. The 40 series GPUs are great, but all of my PCs I played on were 3070 and even an old 2080, and they both performed pretty well, so I have very few complaints about PC performance. And generally speaking, I'm very happy with the direction of the game.
The developers seem to be kind of doing what the finals are doing, and they've decided to just focus on making it fun; they're not worried about being competitive; they're not worried about being ranked; and stuff like that. They want to kind of recapture the original magic of the old version, and they're trying to do that with wacky stuff with variety and faster gameplay rather than just doing a lot of things to kind of get you back in the game quite quickly, so the game is quite far from perfect.
In a different article later this week, probably after I've played a little bit more. I'm going to come back and talk about some of the bad things that I've experienced, but I think this is a really strong start. I'm really happy with World War Zone is again right now of course it's launch week thousands millions of people are downloading, the servers are blowing up, the guns are hot off the press, and there's all sorts of little bugs and balance issues that'll be spelled out over time, but I think that the base idea for the game is again right: it's faster, there's more stuff to do, there's more movement, more guns, more fun, and more wacky things, and I'm really all for it, so I'm happy with this article.
I hope that this can build into a really solid product. All right, guys, that is all for this article. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you learned something useful. If you did, don't forget to like your favorite.
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