Free-2-Play is taking over gaming, but Zombie Studios makes greed overtake their development ambitions.
If you want to unlock a single weapon permanently, you can either spend 20 hours playing the game, or you can load up a credit card for $5 per gun.
Now this is only for the base gun. If you want different sights, barrels, muzzles, and stocks.. thats another $5 to unlock permanently. Each. Of course, you can play countless hours to unlock each one of those seperately.
Now this is only weapons. The same is true for gadgets, grenades, and armor ,which is broken down in 4 categories such as armor, helmet, boots and so on. With so much emphasis on quick money transactions in this game, you'd imagine the publisher would be EA.
This is sad because the limitless custom-ability for your character and weapons is one of the best points in this product. Zombie took their number one selling point and literally made it their number one selling point.
Aside from Zombie's get-rich-quick scheme, the game is enjoyable but burdensome. The mechanics are good, but not smooth. There is server lag from time to time, but in general they are good. The engine is nice and pretty (especially for F2P title), and I never noticed a single dip in FPS with my system (HD 7970, i5 2500k, 8GB Ram). However, the engine does struggles with player collisions, hit detection or bullet registration, and it fails to compensate for latency.
Do not bother joining a server with 100+ ms latency. You will be at a severe disadvantage when you consider this game will not compensate for any latency and the game fails to properly register bullet impacts at time.
The best analogy or comparison I can make, playing Blacklight with 100-120ms is like playing Call of Duty with 350ms. Yes. It is that bad.
However, game is totally playable with a sub 50 latency, and it actually is fun in short burst. But that is all it is good for. The game lacks any sustain to trap you in because the whole time you are frustrated by minor annoyances that add up to be a bigger headache. And when you finally played for enough hours to buy all the proper gear, you find yourself even more annoyed when the next time you log in to play all you're gear has expired and you are now using default gear.
In short, it plays exactly what you would expect a free shooter would, and that is not a compliment. The micro-transactions get out of hand and ruin what would have been a great way to customize your outfit.