Recent reviews by shkodder

Have played SD2 for over 2000 hrs (mostly 1v1 MP) and will likely play more. The core concepts of the game are exciting and overall SD2 has a lot of potential among other RTS games. However, considering the total inability of the developers to properly manage their game as well as a ridiculous price for what essentially is an unfinished early access project, I have to give it a thumbs down. DO NOT buy this game, unless you are looking for a competitive multiplayer experience AND you are a WW2 history fan AND you are willing to put up with several irrational game balance and design choices.

When SD2 released as Beta in 2019, it already was close to being one of the greatest RTSs out there: smooth mechanics (generally improved from SD44 and WG), a unique balance between gameplay and realism, promising deckbuilding system, lots of opportunities for competitive play, tons of both MP and SP content and much more. I couldn't wait for the developers to add a few finishing touches (mostly oriented at improving the user-friendliness) before officially releasing the game and telling the public about it........ None of this happened. Eugen systems have instead gotten into an infinite loop of pumping out DLCs and awkwardly trying to balance out the "side effects" of newly added content afterwards. Quite literally zero effort was put into attracting new players: no advertising, no promotion, no in-game tutorial (????!!!!), the in-game instructions and unit stats are often blatantly wrong and misleading, 2+ years in and the UI still looks like it was made with a help of a YouTube crash course for beginners. As a result, long waiting times even to find a 1v1 game and non-existent matchmaking balance (95% of matches are noob vs veteran).

A number of other reviews complain about the balance between factions and individual units, but the developers release patches fairly often (credit to them) and the multiplayer meta is constantly changing. In my opinion, this adds more variety and prevents the game from reaching a stale repetitive state. The issue is poor communication of those changes by the devs to the playerbase. Some patches include completely uncalled for gamebreaking tweaks, because the creators are sadly unfamiliar with their own product. Luckily, the community assists Eugen systems in shaping the game. Besides suggesting proper balance changes, the community also runs self-organised tournaments and provides help to newer players.

As for singleplayer, despite offering a wide range of Army General campaigns and Historical missions, SD2 is clearly NOT intended for singleplayer experience. The AI is not capable of offering much besides the good old "human wave" spam tactics and can only present a challenge by thoughtlessly dumping large amounts of whatever units at the player. Overall, singleplayer is 100 times more boring compared to what multiplayer has to offer.

I was really hoping I could give an enthusiastic review to this game, but I simply can't.