Mikko Lähteenmäki

(500 hours in the game at the time of writing.) Playing on and off since the beta, if post civil war American Southern states bayou swamps with voodoo zombies and old western style gunslinging isn't going to tickle your fancy, you need to acquire some taste, my friend. The gameplay is slower than twitch shooting you're most likely used to, bullets have a travel time, but if shot from aimed sights, are laser accurate. Hit verification is server-side, and due to the aforementioned bullet travel time you have to anticipate your opponents' movements in advance on where you're shooting depending on distance. This sometimes leads to a feeling of shooting someone in the chest and the bullet travels to another server, but them's the breaks. Usually you've only got yourself to blame and Crytek's constantly been improving on this. The game has no useless weapons in principle, even the starting weapons you unlock have a nice variety put in, but you're bound to find your favorites. The game itself is a mixture of battle royale and player versus environment style gameplay where the main objectives drive you to meet other players. Extracting from the map is allowed at any time, even without completing the objective, and there are three spots on the edges of the rather large map to make your way to should situation get too hot for you. In a match there are a maximum of 12 players with 1-3 player teams to fill the roster, so meeting other people is unlikely enough that it's always a bit of a surprise when you do meet them. I can't stress this enough, play with a friend, the game opens up a lot. The game is all about sound design, every gun, every action you do, if you can hear it yourself, others can hear it too. You can pinpoint gunfire and footsteps even through walls so solidly that more skilled players can fire through walls at people with relative confidence. My tip to you as a potential starting player reading this is to start the game with guns blazing and have fun, seek conflict, you might meet your maker faster through meeting more experienced players, but the other side is not improving and I guarantee your motivation to play this game will lower faster than a cow's tail if you have several rounds of 30 minutes of duck-walking in the bushes avoiding making any sound and you get killed by a headshot from some dude you didn't get to see at all. TL;DR: Western gunslinging with zombies, moderate PvP, and slower gameplay with a bit more time to think.