Gameplay Issues 01
Co-op Campaign Issues
- Cutscenes are unskippable even through you can skip cutscenes in singleplayer.
- Your units can still spawn in someone else's vehicles/emplacements
- If a player disconnects their units will not be given to you most of the time. This increases if they were manually controlling their units.
- In the Cold Supper your units can be attacked while you are in a cutscene. This ends up with the medic getting killed which makes the whole mission really difficult.
- In Co-op there seems to be twice the amount of lag and if your hosting it is even more lag. Really annoying.
- Lag causes the player to not be able to command their men. Instead when the server lags it will cause the player to select all related units before selecting the men they want to control effectively giving out orders to the wrong person and giving no orders to the person the player wants to give. For example, if its lagging and a player wants to select a medic to heal a soldier it will instead select the whole squad near him which will cause the whole squad to move away from their defensive positions meanwhile the medic does nothing. So basically, the more lag there is the less ways you can command your own men therefore play the game and Co-op is by far the most laggy of all gamemodes. You can't also save compared to singleplayer so these lag spikes can be lethal to the entire game.
This lagging aspect of the game effects game balance a lot. A player with less lag has a natural advantage at commanding their own men then a player who does not have lag.
- Co-op crashing issues with entities. For some reason moving multiple amounts of units will lag the game severely. While lagging manually controlling grenade throws can crash the game (along with manually controlling while a cut scene starts or manually controlling in general). Smoke grenades seem to crash the game a lot when its lagging.
PVP
- In PVP the player with the most tanks/heavy tanks effectively wins the battle if they are supported by infantry. There is no need to revive anyone because you can call in more cheap units to guard your tanks.
- Rocket launchers are inconsistent with short ranges. Your Anti-tank units will most likely be killed before they can fire another shot.
- Matches favor long range battles which is annoying if your trying to attack because the maps lack a lot of props to give cover. Most of the units will have to prone to fire back and there is no way to tell some of your men to stop and give fire. There is also no way for a squad to muti-task property like in Men of War. You cannot tell some members of your squad to throw smoke without moving up the whole squad while they are in fire. There is no way you can grenade spam and storm the enemy.
- Machine guns and snipers are too strong. Submachine gunners have no range and rifle men shoot too slow. A squad with a machine gun has a huge advantage over ones with just rifles. You men cannot hit their target if they are not veterans or elite units. The meta so far is to purchase machine gunners to lock down areas. You cannot charge a machine gunner unless you have superior numbers in any way possible. Even if you grenade the machine gunner it is most likely that the enemy player has already begun a offensive on other positions (And units are easily replaceable) .
- The unit cap is annoying because it causes most games to end up in a stalemate where victors cannot cause a full victory and losers cannot regain their positions. After the player with the best positions on the map solidifies their defense they can easily hold them. This is because the losing player is forced to attack while the winning player can either stay back or better yet do a offensive defense. Unless the loser can somehow muster enough strength to completely overrun the enemy defense chances are that a side counterattack would already be happening. The unit cap basically causes the losers to be forced into a tug-of-war with them losing since both sides want to have as much units as possible.
- T-34's, KV's and BT's are very unbalanced. The road system can be exploited by holding right-click so that they race into enemy territory on full speed before being controlled manually to attack behind the lines. For some reason the tanks have a weird consistency with speed on roads and they accelerate when your not controlling them.
General Gameplay Issues
- Grenades are very inconsistent across the board in terms of timing and killing. The explosions radius of the grenades are very lack luster and there will be times when a grenade explodes right underneath a soldier without killing them.
The F1 frag is too bouncy to be thrown property. You can't predict the cooking of the grenades property. The explosion radius and damage is too small. The only good thing about F1 Grenades is that they only take up 1 inventory space. There is no timer number on the grenade like in Men of War. So the only way to tell a grenade has been thrown is by the animation and soldiers running back and forth. This wouldn't be a problem if the animations actually played 100% of the time. Sometimes while throwing a grenade your soldiers won't do a animation so you will have no idea if they threw it. There is also no way to quickly tell where you threw your grenade. The line that tells you where your throwing the grenade bugs out and points in the wrong area when you move a lot. Manually controlling it in first person mode makes it bug out even more and you can't see where it's landing unless your standing up. The cooking of the grenades seem to vary based on what type of grenade your using. The best thing to do is to hold for no longer then 1 second. After 2 seconds it seems to explode randomly early or late. The German smoke grenade that looks like a potato masher looks way to similar to the potato masher. The German grenades take up way too much space and should be able to stack vertically. They cause your inventory to be a mismatch of available squares. There is only 3 types of grenades in the game. If there's more then it's probably never going to be seen in combat. The Russians have 2 and the Germans have one. Grenades thrown fast can launch itself off at a random arc because the grenade line that tells you where it lands doesn't seem to react fast enough. It's impossible to spam grenades in battle. Most of the time the unit runs towards the enemy despite being in range. The whole squad for some reason runs to the enemy when someone wants to throw a grenade. When the game is lagging throwing grenades becomes a chore unless you do it manually. After throwing a grenade the soldier most of the time would be stuck in the animation of throwing the grenade or doing the throwing animation twice. You can't move when throwing a grenades or selecting grenades. It's hard to tell if a smoke grenade covers the area or not because the enemy sometimes would just kill your men in it anyways. In order to be safe the player would need to throw twice amount of smoke. The wind direction for the smoke is also impossible to tell. AT grenades have inconsistent damage. The magnetic mine for the German is just dumb to use. There is no way a soldier would run away safely once it has been thrown and that's if they manage to run up right next to the tank.
Gameplay Issues 02
Emplacements
- Emplacement sandbag covers stops the shooting and manual control of the emplacement. This causes a lot of bugs if your trying to shoot and build cover.
- The cover blocks the gun most of the time... It's actually worse to build cover on high ground compared to just not building it.
- The cover barely protects the gun against anything besides bullets and that's if the enemy is shooting directly in front of you.
- For some reason the guns never aim up. Or shoot at infantry, or anything at all. You have to manually tell the guns to fire and for Anti Tank guns manually switch their ammunition to HE in order for them to shoot infantry.
- The free movement/hold movement for emplacement do nothing.
- Sometimes your emplacement will still fire despite being told not to fire. (Due to lag probably the order never got through.)
- Mortars are way too accurate. You can hit a man directly 95% of the time. This makes rushing a mortar position impossible for any side trying to attack mortar without armour.
- Machine gun emplacements don't shoot at good targets unless they shoot first. They also don't use the range they have so the enemy just sneaks up on them.
- Your men would just get out of AA guns when they get shot at...
WHY FOR THE LOVE OF GOD ARE REPAIR KITS NOT REUSEABLE?
- Most of the time if your emplacement is damage you will be running around for a repair kit and that's if you notice that their is no repair kits in the emplacement.
- There's no way to accurately tell what part of the emplacement has been damaged.
- The animation for the emplacements bug out a lot when under fire, remanding, lagging, repositioning, and basically if the emplacement is getting shot at your not going to be able to move it or get back on it. Emplacement's < Tanks in most scenarios.
- There is a lot of bugs when remanning a lost gun with the men either disappearing or freezing. The men would either no longer do the animation, infinte reloads, no damage shells, no ammo, no men in the gun, flying in the air, dying, and being transported to the dark realm.
- Shooting outside your range does nothing most of the time despite the fact that you could be aiming directly on a flat field. The shells or bullets would seemly fly off in random directions if they shoot outside of the normal range. This wouldn't be a problem if the range finder is consistent and if guns worked like that in real life.
- Heavy arty will randomly shoot outside of the circle if not aimed down for a thousand years. This is a problem because those shells can go anywhere... Like directly into friendly lines full of your own troops and since the heavy arty are in the back lines with your supplies it can end up with a massacre. Heavy arty shells should not be flying outside their circle radius when manually controlling because it makes it pointless to have that circle.
- There's no grass camo like in Men of War for your emplacements.
- There's too much tiny components to be repaired which eats up repair kits and there's no way to tell what your repairing. This makes it so that if a gun is broken and you are trying to repair it, one, you have no idea if the soldiers are repairing that broken wheel, second, most of the time the soldier won't even repair despite getting out of the tank, and third, repairing the wheels takes the same time as repairing the main gun which makes no sense. The wheels are also the first thing to be shot and broken which means that you will always need a supply truck next to a emplacement if they have wheels on them. (Emplacement are also slow as ♥♥♥♥.)
Guns
- Submachine guns have no range. The PPSH cannot shoot for ♥♥♥♥ long range even if you manually control it. Only in close quarters does the submachine gun become useful but by then any gun does.
- Rifles are too slow and your men will miss most of the time unless you manually control. Semi-auto rifles are even worse since they seem to reset their range when you manually control.
- The German MG's are naturally more better then the Russians because they have
Tracer rounds Faster rates of fire which equals more accurate and less time to kill Ammo takes up less space in the inventory with the MG-34 clip just taking up one square. The DP-47 which is the Russian's main machine gun clip takes up 4 squares. The German MG-42 box takes up just 6 and holds 250 rounds. The German MG-42 can cover the entire field with even more ammo being carried meanwhile the Russians will have less ammo, less space, and less firepower.
- Anti-Tank rifle men will often shoot at infantry and waste ammo. This wouldn't be a problem if they actually hit the enemy when they are shooting at them.
Gameplay Issues 03
Issues overall
- All muti-turret tanks won't shoot all of their turrets when you want them to. Most tanks in fact don't shoot their hull machine guns most of the time.
- Your men seems to go back and forth when you make them run. They also have trouble getting out of cover.
- Your medic is the fastest but since he is equipped with a pistol it means that most of the time the medic would run first into death.
- Your units won't throw grenades when prone most of the time.
For the love of god please stop using roads all the time. Your tanks and trucks will use roads regardless of who is on them. This means they will often ram into each other, destroy towed emplacements, knocking over each other, running right into a ambush, right into a attack, accelerate to light speed before eating ♥♥♥♥ and dying. And it’s even worse for bots .
- There seems to be some sort of teleportation phenomenon in this game. Tanks will sometimes teleport back and forth for no reason causing you to miss shots or for you to just teleport behind the enemy.
- Men spreading out and getting close is very inconsistent. Most of the time you will have men that are way too close and then being way too far from each other.
- The maps are way too empty to have actual cover. Not to mention that most of your cover is really ♥♥♥♥. The best defensive cover is sandbag lines and foxholes. This is because sandbag lines are fast, easy to make, layerable, and replaceable. Building trenches are slow, can block vehicles, and is only useful against arty attacks/tank attacks. Even then a sandbag line is so layerable and spammy that you can just switch out a line if your under fire. The only good thing about a build trench is that it's permanent through this doesn't win the game most of the time.
- The bottom hud needs more slots for options.
- The map is way too small to observe anything and you have to really blow it up to see the front properly. Not to mention the corners clip when you rotate the camera which is annoying. Transparency is also dosen't fix the minimap's problems when the minimap has minimal detail so it's better just to see compare red dots to blue dots. It's also hard to tell if something is a tank, emplacement, self-propelled gun, car, etc because instead of using those icons it's just a arrow or dot which blends together.
- AI pathing on maps is ♥♥♥♥. The AI would run in random directions to get to their destination. They will also have trouble getting on guns, tanks, etc.
- Map trenches are too skinny to be used property with soldiers often facing the wrong side if you don't individually select them to cover. Also moving on certain angles of the trench will deselect you from manual control for some reason. Trenches won't save you from tanks or arty so it's useless to be in them. They are also easily infected by the enemy and your own constructed trench is much better.
- Tanks will stop in their tracks when running over a prop despite their acceleration.
- When you shoot a tank and stun it for some reason it will slide forwards and then teleport backwards.
- There seems to be a lot of sledding in this game with men that are revived still in their death pose following behind their squad leader. It is also hard to tell who's squad leader. Also why doesn't your men automatically switch to their helmets if they have one? Why do we pick up knives and hats when we want to collect all? This was not the case in Men of War where clicking collect all would only transfer necessary resources like bullets and grenades.
- Sometimes your men would be possessed and start crawling like a demon with insane speed.
- Highlights blend in on the minimap too well and in general it's harder to see the highlight of the other player when a gunfight is happening.
- High explosive shells from medium to light tanks have really short radius of damage. For light tanks such as the t-70 you can just barely kill someone with splash damage. HE shells rarely destroys props or buildings.
- Not a lot of buildings or props are destructible like in Men of War. That's if you even run into buildings to use for cover.
- Russian DP-47 needs tracer rounds.
Gates Of Hell Issues
Content
- There seems to be a lack of current content that is playable with a lot of problems with modding. There is only a few missions and the Co-op for them is terrible and they were obliviously not designed for Co-op.
- There is only 3 gamemodes right now for mutiplayer, co-op for missions, co-op for conquest, and Assualt zones. The Assualt zone maps are lack luster and they mostly consist of empty bumps of dirt with no cover at all. There is a lack of trees, grass, and props. In Men of War there was way more gamemodes.
- You can no longer change your game name in the lobby which is kinda sad to see because before you can do so many things with it in Men of War.
- Conquest is too laggy for Co-Op and loads way too long for Co-op. The enemy often spawns in random amounts of units with no coordination so it's pretty easy unless they outnumber you 10-1.
- Most of the new "unique" units are used once and never really used again. There seems to be a focus on variants rather then variety with the marder tanks rarely being seen. Most of the units do the same thing with no difference. For example, the convicted recruits, partisan, border guards, ostrolegioneers, volksturm, do the same thing as in being meat sheilds. The size of the guns for the T-34 basically determines it's difference.
Modding
- There is no longer a mod file for you to see your mods from. This is annoying for creating your own mods and seeing what mods you have in their physical location. The current way to see your mod is by going to programfiles (x86) > steam > steamapps > workshop > content > 400750 which is outside of the game localization.
- Your own mods are very hard to update and install with some problem with uploading your own content.
- The localization of the files is different in men of war with a different style of resource files, and localization files.
- There's not a lot of new stuff in the editor with a lot of similarities with the Men of War editor.
- There is also a lot of out-of-sync issues. For example, you can have the same mod as your friends and play that same mod but leave the next time you come back it will be out-of-sync even through you played it already without changing anything. There was a case where me and my friend simply left the computer for 30 minutes and then came back without a out-of-sync error despite being afk.
Overall
- The game needs a lot more optimization and content. This game needs to have at least the same amount of content as the Valour mod for Men of War and Robz Realism combined. There needs to be cavalry units in the game and for some ways for men to shoot on transport vehicles.
- The lag in this game is insane. For some reason it seems that decreasing your FOV increases lag? because it increases some sort of FOV fog.
- There should be a option to downgrade the animation so that you don't need to lag for every entity on the map. For example, such as only playing advanced animation when manually controlling the AI.
- The maps needs more polish because right now they are just a bunch of bumps of dirt. All of the maps can be summarized as "Somewhere in Russia".
- There needs to be more factions in the game. There also needs to be some more focus on collaborators because those are really interesting.
- There needs to be more guns and grenade types in general for different units.
- First person needs first person guns like in Call to Arms.
- There needs to be a timer for your grenades.
- The highlight system needs to be overhauled to be brighter and louder.
- For singleplayer there is a loading cutscene but for Co-op there is none? Also the missions for singleplayer is locked but for Co-op all of them are available and once you play them you unlock them also for singleplayer as well so whats the point for locking them in singleplayer?
- This game really needs to be standalone because right now you need to buy both of Call of Arms and Gates of Hell. That's probably why nobody is playing this game because it already is reaching 100$ when this game is worth around 20$. Sales of 30% isn't going to attract anyone when other RTS games go for 80% on sales. Men of War Assualt squad 2 also has the same thing with even better worth due to the workshop. Buying this game is only for long-term WW2 RTS fan's and so this game should really be cheap and available to everyone. Why not allow for some elements of the Call to Arms workshop to be in Gates of Hell? Or perhaps some Call to Arms content to be in Gates of Hell?
- Server's have a long loading time for mutiplayer. Creating a game sometimes gets you a "Server cannot connect" screen. There seems to be no LAN option. Either the UI for Local LAN is horrible or not there.
For some reason you can't purchase Gates of Hell for your friends on steam?
List-O-Bugs
Mission Bugs for Co-Op and Singleplayer
- For some reason the text here are out of place. They are also just typed in so it looks really werid with the realistic background as it should be hand written. It would be better to just go to photoshop and scribble some words then to just type letters over it.
- In the mission "The Ace of Swords" the panzer 3 for some reason is AI for Co-op. This is because the developers forget to edit the option in editor to change AI to User. (Reminder this is for base game without any modding)
- Also in "The Ace of Swords" you can see the tank men spawn in
- In "The Cold Supper" the partisan's won't be given to you after they are rescued in the secret objective in Co-op.
- People getting into tanks despite them being destroyed. Or not getting out at all.
-People being bugs out when going in tank and emplacement
- This also happen to AI when they get on there own tank and emplacement
- People and tank flying
- The mission "Unbroken" your units can spawn outside the map (Co-op)
- Infantry bugs
- Muti-player spawn bug. Since your units spawn so close for some reason your emplacements will often bump into your tanks or half-tracks. Worse yet your emplacement can get bugged when towed making them immovable and you can't leave them. Here in this case this half track got bugged with a Pak-38 so that it couldn't move or tow it in spawn!
- I don't even know what's happening. Server crashed too. ( Not a basegame mission. )
- Apparently around 500 players in game but no server? Even if you make a server.
- For some reason in Steam the achievements are oddly typed...
- Even the trading cards have werid descriptions XD
Exploits?
- For the MG emplacement you can hide your men in some solid objects and still can shoot out long as nothing block the MG's barrel. It seems like only the hitbox of the MG is there so the infantry can kinda clip into things. In the mission "Among the Heavens" you can use the hotel in order to shoot soviets.
- In the mission "Among the Heavens" the hotel is actually usable if you manually control people to clip up to the second floor.
There seems to be bugs every time you play the game and it really takes from the experience so far.
What Went Right
- The sound design of the game is pretty good and there was no problem on that end.
- The music is way better then in Men of War and is not annoying even if it repeats.
- When the game works in small scale combat or when it's not lagging it shines in it's actually intended gameplay.
- The bugs can be really funny at times like men aiming their guns like gangsters or flying around.
- Ragdolls are pretty funny too especially the ones that stand up. They should really use them as decoys for sniper missions or something.
- Tank gameplay is ok if it works. Longer ranges needs to be added however to make it truly good.
- The historical accuracy in the game is pretty good and there was no moments where it seemed too fictional.
- The singleplayer is the best part of the game even if the loading cutscenes sometimes lacks the synching of subtittles with the voice acting. The cutscenes are alright and the missions are pretty decent in some aspects. It is definitely an improvement from the missions of Men of War.
Overall the game needed to be released at a much later date because it still has a lot of issues from the beta. It definitely needs to be sold different from Call to Arms or at least allow you to buy this DLC for friends. The optimization and lagging ruins a lot of aspects of the game. It also lacks content for the base game with modding being even more harder to do compared to men of war. It is worth as of version 1.016.0. around $13 dollars for me. It would do a huge benefit to this game's sale if it was not marketed as a DLC for a dead Call to Arms game because people would most likely not buy it off the bat if its a DLC compared to a standalone game which it is. People don't buy DLC's when they are looking to buy games. It just seems kinda odd why Gates of Hell is still a DLC when it seems like it has more similarities to Men of War then Call to Arms. This game is overall a 5/10 just below average but probably improvable.
Feel free to add some of your bug experiences in the comments or any bad game mechanics/gameplay features.
Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2687626973
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