Battalion 1944 finally came out on steam
For those of you who remember, Battalion 1944 was announced in 2016 as a Kickstarter campaign for an old-school World War 2 competitive FPS that combined the best traits of Battlefield (destructible environments, large open maps) with the handling of older Call of Duty titles like CoD 3 or World at War. It released to not a lot of fanfare on the 1st of February, and it already has an overall “mixed” review score out of almost four thousand reviews. Not an auspicious start.
Seeing as it wasn’t too expensive, I bought and downloaded it. First impression was not good, as the launcher took eight minutes to actually launch the game (oh, and make sure it’s closed once you exit the game or else Steam thinks you’re still playing it). Getting into a match, the FPS was teeth-grindingly frustrating for about five minutes before everything started to run smoothly. The CoD 2-3 comparisons are apt when it comes to the graphics, but everything else is wholesale lifted from Counterstrike and newer CoDs, with zero weapons sway and bunnyhopping being the only viable tactics. The maps so far are alternately too large but too small for the gameplay, having every pathway easily buttoned up by riflemen that barely have to aim to be able to hit you and trenches easily locked down by machine guns spraying from around corners with little decrease in accuracy. Not at all what the kickstarter promised.
The main reason I ended up refunding the game, despite enjoying it somewhat, was mostly due to the devs themselves. Taking a stroll through the game’s discussions, I noticed many of the players were kickstarter backers complaining about not receiving keys or any other memorabilia despite paying upwards of a hundred bucks in some cases. The devs were nowhere to be seen, and according to their Kickstarter page the last update was on January 29th, with no interaction with commenters asking questions about not receiving keys. Seeing this, along with the clear downgrade in graphics from the footage used on the Kickstarter trailer (Jim Sterling’s use of the term “bullshot” comes to mind), really has me thinking that this project stopped being a major focus for this team once they made a certain amount of money off of their backers. And seeing as some of the more significant stretch goals were past the 325,000 mark (the campaign raised a total of 317,281 USD), I’m also thinking that they might have pulled a No Man’s Sky and promised more then they could deliver. Either way, to screw over those who paid over 35 bucks by not communicating and silently releasing the game for less than 15 bucks on Early Access is not a good look, along with day one DLC.
So was it the company having eyes bigger than their stomachs? An actual scam that might just be someone’s Counterstrike mod with a fake trailer? Did the devs owe someone money? Don’t know. But please don’t purchase this without doing some research into the background first. We already have to deal with this crap from big-name publishers. We shouldn’t let indie devs get away with it as well.