So Valorant; the shooter made by the same team behind League of Legends has a lot going for it. It's good, it's fun, it's pretty enough now that the game has had a few polishing updates, but its hard to say much beyond that.

The game takes inspiration from a lot of other shooters, and that's obvious the second you boot it up. The tactics of CS:GO combined with the chaos of Overwatch should be a no-brainer, right? Well, it's taken some tweaking and it really shows by the fact that the game has been getting frequent updates with character patches all the time and metas that evolve less so around the players and more so around the devs. Some characters are insanely fun to play, like the crazy setups that can be done with Cypher or the high-octance anime battles that can be done as Jett but other characters like Yoru are gimmicky at best and just not fun to play as at their worst. No character is completely unplayable but the fact that almost no one plays smokes willingly says a lot about your game design, especially when said smokes are an incredibly crucial part of the game.

But so what if the character meta is a little weird at times, the gameplay is tactics based so it should be consistent and fun, right? Well not really. They're fun when they work and when people play the game as intended but often times, you will catch people running and firing, camping in corners and hitting shots that just should not be feasible. There are an infinite number of clips of a bullet going nowhere near someone and landing a headshot and its hard to say a game feels fair when that happens. Each of the guns has their own strengths and weaknesses that don't feel as strictly enforced as they should (i.e. judge killing at ranges up to 20m and op killing at ranges as close as 2m) and its just hard to call the game a tactics game when the mechanics are so janky.

Now for the most egregious part of the game and what inspired me to write this review in the first place, the ranking system! Dear god, this game has a terrible ranking and placement system. The game not only does nothing to prevent smurfing but actively encourages it, by allowing people to join all smurf account lobbies for the first 10 unrated and counting surrender wins, meaning you can have 8-10 accounts ready to go in about 2-3 hours, but they actively encourage it. Riot Games has done nothing to prevent this problem and it gets worse as time goes on. Now I know high elo players like to say just "git gud" but I don't see why I should have to grind ranked for hours, study gameplay and reach Plat just to have an enjoyable experience. Online games should be fun and competitive at all skill levels and smurfs completely ruin that, requiring me to play solo or duo queue if I want to have an enjoyable ranked experience, as full teams usually end up just being completely crazy. Which Riot fully admits to by allowing Diamond and up to only duo queue. They admit that their ranking and queueing system is broken by having this rule! Which you think would spur them on to create a better ranking system but they just have not bothered. In a competitive, tactics-based shooter such as this one, fairness in competition is of the utmost importance but I almost rarely run into games where my team completely stomps the enemies or vice versa.

Regardless, I would like to say some positive things about the game, because I do believe there are positives. The mechanics and ideas are genuinely fun, combining abilities with tactical gunplay makes for a really fun shooter experience. The maps are mostly well-designed, with a few exceptions and the problem of far too many corners to clear, but overall the maps really dictate the strategy. The fact that I don't particularly love nor hate most maps proves they designed them well because it shows that they at least made them fair. Gun skins are actually really cool, even if they are incredibly overpriced, but it isn't exploitative like most shooters are these days. Character designs are well-made and the personalities and history behind each character make them feel real, even after hearing the same voice lines over and over. The lore, while scarce and underwhelming at times, is probably one of the most fun things about the game.

Overall, it's kind of just an average shooter that if nothing else have made me want to try out CS:GO and boot up TF2 for the first time in years which probably isn't a good thing. A game should probably not actively make me want to seek out it's competition, especially when it's competition is 10-15 years older than it. It needs a heavy breakdown of its mechanics and I think it would be best if Riot brought on someone who has actually made a shooter before, because they clearly can't do it completely right, even if they get the tactics thing right. Incredibly fun to watch, not as fun to play, which says a lot about the game.