i'm not oblivious to the irony of my feelings about this trash. when i was in my teens, magazines like egm and gamefan loved to report on joseph lieberman's campaign against violence in video games. he and his fellow senators didn't really get it, and even as kids we knew better. better than them, better for ourselves. mortal kombat was and always has been looney tunes, but these crusty old politicians took it seriously - at least enough to raise funds from clueless conservative parents. this whole era tilled the soil from which gamergate would sprout a couple of decades later. censorship was the enemy, no matter what considerations might motivate the direction of art or changes to it.

(a couple of side notes: howard lincoln, president of nintendo america in 1993, said that year that night trap would never appear on a nintendo system. well, he was wrong about that. also, it's pretty interesting to see these guys wring their hands about konami's justifier lightgun "teaching children that any problem can be solved with a gun" when we consider the world we live in - at least in the us - today. lightguns are pretty much a thing of the past, and i feel like it's a safe bet that kids who played lethal enforcers didn't all go on to become cops. but if they did, well, then i don't imagine lieberman has anything negative to say about them. i'm quite sure he's not thinking about what a tragedy it is that some old video games "justified" them becoming the violent foot soldiers of the white supremacist state. and how would we ever know if even a single cop in 2022 ever played lethal enforcers, anyway? what the fuck am i even talking about?)

here i am, well into my adulthood and reading articles about a fascist recruitment campaign which happened in roblox, thinking i'd like to make it my mission to get my nephews away from this junk. initially i frowned upon learning that the elder of my nephews was playing lots of this because, well, it's fucking devoid of any sort of aesthetic quality. funko pop shit. and, in fairness, my nephews are still young and easily distracted and who the fuck am i anyway, i'm literally talking in irc in between paragraphs here about cruelty squad and the worldview of its developer, who is supposedly anti-capitalist, though he also collaborated with the brigador devs not long after they were exposed as something awful forum posters into white nationalism and holocaust denial or whatever, and i find the whole situation frankly fucking bewildering and idk if i want to play this game (cruelty squad) which otherwise seems to be, incidentally, the exact inverse of a game like roblox... but is it really? jfc i really am an idiot. sometimes nothing makes sense. it's not like i'm afraid of some level of depravity... i mean, have you seen the movies and music i'm into? but i mean, despite my depression and the world i'm not a doomer or a nihilist. the red pill is a metaphor in the matrix, a movie that whips ass, not the hateful bullshit some 4chan nerds equate with being "based." all of this is so much weirder and more unsettling to me than mortal goddamn kombat ever even came close to being.

look, i mean... i don't want to approach my nephews as a lieberman, as some arbiter of content safe for consumption with a stick up their ass. still, one thing i do know: roblox is shit and the kids could do better. play a fucking dragon quest. discover culture, idk. maybe even go outside, learn how to be alone.

11/12/2023 EDIT: Apparently back in September they added one new free map, which is great! And then replied to their own post complaining about how it's a missed sales opportunity! ??? dropping half a star.


Sold over 100k in barely a month on aesthetics alone, now struggles to break 300 concurrent players in a 24hr peak. You wouldn't think this is an issue, but I promise you it is, because most of these people are playing private lobby and the few who venture out into randoms will soon be blasted by the remaining 10% of the playerbase that has already grinded out the card/character unlocks and leveled up their decks. Median playtime: 8hrs. Median playtime among my Steam friends that own it: 2-2.5hrs, excluding the half who still haven't launched the game. What's with that, huh?

Did you know the game only has like 2 songs when you're not standing by the jukebox? Most of my friends have already muted the in-game music because they play this one song on loop whenever you're not in-game; thankfully when you're in-match the music stops. Uh, it just stops. There is no music at all in-match. What's really bizarre to me given that they tweet out other artists' songs overlapped with the game but afaik they literally only play if you go to the jukebox. Please correct me if I'm wrong about this. EDIT: OST has 6 songs, no idea what the other 4 would even be unless they're tucked in the jukebox.

Held back by a lot of really basic things, ordered by most important imo:
- Card unlocks are all generally more powerful than the base kit.
- Repeat card drops are fed to existing cards to level them up.
- Only 1v1 or 2v2 modes, no FFA and nothing higher even though maps can support it easily.
- Tiny map pool. The demo in February had 2 maps, the game launched with 4; none on the roadmap unless some offhand tweet mentioned it that I can't find.
- Can't rotate teams in private lobby without recreating lobby every time.
- Default/extremely basic Unity movement, no sense of weight or momentum which makes tracking anyone feel awful. (Feels extremely similar to Gunfire Reborn in this regard)
- Other characters need to be grinded out to even play as, really frustrating vibing with a design and being met with "erm, grind pls?" like uhhh okay then.
- Most of the guns feel bad imo, I feel like I'm actively downgrading myself when I swap to anything other than the default pistol besides the sniper (which might be a good thing given the card situation tbh)

Of all of the things to "go back to form" on with your FPS, including a gameplay-affecting battlepass/XP grind is not one of them. This was always one of the worst parts of playing CoD post-3 or any of the clones, like oh yeah sure just give the already experienced player mindless proximity mines and an auto shotty while the n00b gets a sawed-off. Lmfao get real.

The B-line to selling an expansion pass instead of reconsidering the unlocks at all or adding any new maps or modes is extremely disheartening, but it makes that "crazy good" 2/3 launch sale make a little more sense now I guess! Maybe I'm reading into that one too much but then there's this tweet which is uhhh??

I don't know, in a word I'd say "vapid" but that feels overly mean, but it's all I can really think of. Would love to see this get more gamemodes (FFA, KOTH, CTF) and a much higher player cap and absolutely desperately needs more maps. As it stands now? I don't know how you're supposed to get much out of this unless you love spinning a roulette endlessly while vaguely pointing in someone's direction.