Note: This is a pre-release review, as of August 2015.
TL;DR: This game sucks. It's still pre-release, but after 2 years of waiting for it to show any noteworthy signs of improvement, I'm skeptical that it's ever going to be truly playable. Don't spend more that $5 on it until after it's fully released and gets some good reviews (that aren't obvious plants by the developers).
INote: This is a pre-release review, as of August 2015.
TL;DR: This game sucks. It's still pre-release, but after 2 years of waiting for it to show any noteworthy signs of improvement, I'm skeptical that it's ever going to be truly playable. Don't spend more that $5 on it until after it's fully released and gets some good reviews (that aren't obvious plants by the developers).
I bought this game in 2013--just after it was released--because the description, videos, and screenshots indicated that it was going to be a rewarding single-player and multi-player experience. I paid more for it than some FPS games that I've gotten over 200 hours of fun out of, because it looked like it would turn into a fun, peudo-realistic FPS, both online and offline.
Sadly, 2 years later, the graphics still look shoddy, the multiplayer is still one-dimensional, and the single player campaign is basically unplayable. For example, you can't save during the single-player campaign, so if you die, you get booted back to the beginning of the mission, and missions can be quite long, since a lot of stealth is involved. Stealth doesn't work like it should, either. If you shoot a bad guy in the head with a silencer, and nobody is around to see/hear it, sometimes, the alarm goes off. When that happens, bad guys don't come through the gates, get airdropped, walk on from the edge of the map, or any other sensible thing; they just spawn in silently in random places and come after you. So, now that walkway you spent 5 minutes clearing so you'd be able to scout around has enemies on it, even though you had a clear view of all the ways they could have gotten onto it from.
Linux support is one reason why I bought this game. However, 2 years later, it still doesn't work in a playable fashion. (The other paragraphs of this review pertains to the Windows version, which I've been playing on my other hard drive.) If you put the game fullscreen and start a mission (online or single-player), you can only look up, and when you move the mouse, it immediately reverts your view to a lovely panorama of a completely uninteresting sky or ceiling. This is a known bug having to do with the supposedly cross-platorm engine, Unity...and has been for quite some time. You can edit an obscure config file by hand to make it work in windowed mode, but who wants to play an FPS in a window?
Physics and movement are STILL screwed-up. I could sort-of understand jumping and crouching not being implemented for the first year of public play (although...why?), but even now, you can only sometimes jump over low railing, rocks, etc. that come up to your character's knees. Also, when you shoot a bad guy, sometimes he goes flying off into the sky, because, obviously, that's how people go down when shot. Sometimes, when you're crouching between two obstacles with ~3 feet of empty space in front of you, bullet holes will appear in the wall-that-doesn't-exist in front of you when you're shooting or being shot at.
The one positive thing I have to say about this game, so far, is that your character's body exists and moves realistically. Shooting recoils realistically, and reloading looks like what you'd see in a YouTube video of a skilled weapons instructor--not too fast, and not too slow, with bumps and clicks in all the right places. There are still only three guns, none of which are actually FUN to shoot (they don't make a satisfying/realistic "bang", don't have realistic smoke, make electric "sizzles" instead of bullet holes, etc.), but they do have some nice options on them, such as attachable suppressors, toggles for fire speed, light, laser, and so on.
I get that the devs are spending a LOT of time and energy trying to make it realistic (as much as an enjoyable video game can be), but I think that they're focusing on the details to the complete exclusion of the sorts of things that make a first-person shooter fun to play. It's obvious that the developers love the game they're making enough to be totally meticulous about the stuff they think is cool--and that's great--but in order for everyone else to have a "love of the game", they need to ignore some of those figurative trees and get around to planting the rest of the forest.
I've used a LOT of beta software, and played a LOT of early pre-release games; and few, if any, have been this bad after two years of public release--and NONE have been this bad for so long after the point when they started to actually charge money for them. $5 for this level of quality I could understand, but $15? It's still not a lot, but that price point means they're competing with the likes of Killing Floor and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, which are vastly better games than Interstellar Marines. Honestly, if it were free-to-play, it probably wouldn't be played, as it is, now. If this game starts to become worth playing before I entirely give up on it, I'll change this review, accordingly.… Expand
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