Starting with the Review from hardcoreplayer.com : http://www.hardcoregamer.com/2015/03/26/dirty-bomb-the-most-honest-free-to-play-shooter-of-the-year/141083/
What to say else… That guy has more or less the same opinion that me. I was happy to learn that some new movement mechanics are planned in order to make DB a very parkour based game. I am directly quoting that from the article :
The game also has a parkour system to allow players to wall run, triple jump, and reach higher ground, but it wasn’t available in the build we played. Still, we were told that Dirty Bomb would ultimately have more parkour in it than Brink, Splash Damage’s previous multiplayer shooter that made parkour a very heavy focus of the action.
The guy is also arguing about TTK, which was also a point I was arguing about. Even though right now I don’t feel like it’s that short, but I would be pleased to see a small TTK increase.
Overall the guy thinks the game has a lot of potential. I can feel that potential too, let’s hope the parkour system will be very well done and the map design will follow to allow us to exploit the parkour system at it’s fullest ! Also, let’s hope for improvements done for the loadout system.
However I also found another article with darker thoughs : http://www.pcgamer.com/dirty-bomb-nails-the-most-important-details-for-shooters-is-that-enough/
PC gamer seems much less optimistic about the future of DB. The game is good and fun, for sure. But in the universe of free to play first person shooters, it’s dogs eat dogs, and there’s plenty of point that the reviewer didn’t liked. The unlocks system to begin with : it’s too long to grab the money and buy a merc, and the card system does not feel balanced for him.
You’ll have access to two Mercs at all times and additional Mercs that will rotate each month. If you like it enough, $20 will get you a starter pack that unlocks six Mercs and 35,000 in-game credits you can use to unlock different loadouts for each. If you like it a lot you can continue not paying and play it for an ungodly amount of time and earn enough credits to unlock the same stuff. Judging by the rate at which I earned things during the demo, this would take a long time.
It’s also free. I can’t say for sure until the game has been live for quite some time, but I don’t think the monetization method of offering free characters and selling more bothers me. What bothers me is that loadouts are handled in the form of cards that come in packs, which you can buy with credits (think EA games, like Mass Effect 3’s multiplayer or Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare). There’s no attempt to hide the fact that some cards are better than others, as they’re tiered as bronze, silver, gold, etc.
Cards, regardless of their quality, can change a character’s gun, which doesn’t seem like a problem because the guns are well balanced. However, common cards—what you’d call “greys” to describe a trash drop in an RPG—have no perks. Better cards have more perks, which did seem unfair, and that’s not something I ever want in a competitive first-person shooter.
The thing is, I really do think that the guy is right on the card system. In my opinion we shouldn’t begin with a loadout with no perks and rely on RNG to get better loadouts. Actually I prefered the old card system much better. The default loadout was assured to be the most balanced of them, while you could still select other cards with more experimental loadouts, without cards technically disadventaged (they have all three perks). For sure there was cards more interesting than others, but at least all cards had their three perks, and you can start with a very well balanced loadout perfectly suiting the character you use. Right now, it’s obvious that a team with rarer cards will be advantaged against another team that couldn’t manage to get anything from the RNG generated loadout cards. What I would suggest here is to base the rarity of the cards not on the number and quality of perks/weapons, but on the character skin ! Default loadout ? Basic skin. Common card loadout ? You look like a peasant ! Legendary card loadout ! You look like a pimp ! It’s basic, and rather awesome.
Putting the card loadout case aside, the author ended with the following words :
I had fun while I played, but the shooter genre is ridiculously competitive and I’m not sure Dirty Bomb can win my attention over the existing heavy hitters, which are also using a monetization model I’m more comfortable with.
Looks like it’s a miss for this one. Since this guy is a journalist from PC Gamer, I would be pretty enclined to take his thoughs seriously though. I remember that this is a pretty popular video game website, so following his feedback may not be a waste of time… This said, the guy from HardcoreGame seemed to totally enjoy the game.
I’ll now let you discuss.