User blog comment:DBD Abyss/9 months of hell. AKA 9 months of Ghosts/@comment-1187559-20140804023834

Campaign - Just like Communism, great idea on paper, but falls flat on its face in practice. They started with this nice idea of begin a guerilla force against a superior force that has completely wrecked the US, but there's no feel of that at all. They lob you into some war torn wreck that could just be Chernobyl for all I care, they have very few stealth segments, most of the time you're just shooting your way though things, as I mentioned in my opinion blog a while back, they left loads of plot holes. And completely left out any form of emotional attachment, like the fact the US was invaded alone is meant to spark of your inner patriotism and make you feel completely connected to the game, but frankly don't, even if you are American. They tried to do what Black Ops 2 did with a Father-Son relationship, but completely botched that up making one son mute and the other devoid of all emotion. He goes from one mission to wanting to save his Dad to not giving a shit that he'd been killed by Rorke, so if he doesn't care, why should we. Fallout 3 made me care more that my Father died. Frankly, the whole thing has great foundations, but inferior construction methods, we can only hope it was done on purpose so it falls down and IW claim the insurance money to retire.

Multiplayer - Admittedly, I didn't play much of it since I've gone off of PvP games as they can lead to too much frustration in the long run unless I'm playing with friends and we can laugh it off. But in the short time I played it against humans I thought it was complete trollop, the maps are poorly designed, the weapons are boringly balanced so none stand out. It's not like MW2 where each gun excels in one area and it shows. The ACR trumps the SC-2010, the SCAR-H trumps the R5, the M4A1 trumps the SA-805, and the list would go on because I love assault rifles since they're great at either camping or running around depending on your situation, and I just couldn't settle on any of them. Some just fire slow, but have high damage, or even slower with some better stability. Or they go the other way round with stupidly low damage, but at least it keeps it out to long range. Honestly, I miss Stopping Power. The ACR was my long range weapon of choice, and it did great. The SC-2010 doesn't give me that same thrill, of course that may as the maps have so few long range sight-lines I can use it for that. I have been using the FAD a bit in hopes of having a CQC weapon, but frankly the SMGs beat it, so the FA-2000 beats the FAD hands down. Of course, I've gotten mildly back in to the multiplayer by playing Wargame, but the bots are so poor, Treyarch makes much better bots. If you play in Recruit they try to match this my restricting the bots ability to aim down sight, but as soon as you go up to regular, they gain the ability to ADS, but seem to do it within a millisecond of seeing you, granted, this would happen on real MP, but as bots do not account for human error it can feel a bit too fast, since if they're locking on to me and downing me that fast on Regular, I don't want to know what they're like on Hardened and Veteran.

Extinction - Extinction is actually OK, to be honest whoever is working on the storyline to that clearly wasn't involved in the main campaign's story since they actually made one enjoyable. While admittedly it can get a bit repeaty, it's not like it's the only game mode guilty of that when you look at other horde survival games like Treyarch's Zombies. I do think that Extinction managed to do a very good job of distinguishing itself, however I feel it did so in a very similar way to Silver the Hedgehog, while he was a great character, and I personally rank him as one of my favourites, he was unlucky enough to first appear in Sonic 06 so it really dragged him down, and I feel this has happened to Extinction. It's a great mode, with real effort put into it, but it's been cursed in having to appear in such an awful game it may simply be forgotten. Of course, I do have some issues with it, the bosses can be a bit over annoying more than fun, like the Kraken, but I feel it can still carry itself quite well.

Community support - Now, here's where I really want to rant. I feel that the community support from IW has really dropped since Robert Bowling left. Bowling was one of the few people to acknowledge the wiki, and I even got a reply from him when I asked for help setting up the Human Element wiki, As for Tina and Candice, they only seem to care if you have a YouTuber subscriber count in the quint digits. I saw one of them retweet a YouTubers tweet about a poll they wanted done, when we've had polls going for ages. And even outside how I dislike that the Community staff shun the community site, they really feel like they're ignoring the community as a whole. After all, we've had Dome and Shipment remade, which in fairness, are completely horrible maps. They do ahve some charm in FFA games, but that's about it. And since they were talking about how Ghosts was going to be all about these "Bigger maps" why remake the little ones? I know they remade Scrapyard and Favela which was alright. But after playing some Favela earlier today against bots I remembered something, Favela is shit. avela was an OK map, but the tight streets and the vertical gameplay made it a CQC map, and the same could be said of Scrapyard, and frankly, unless they want to re-make the Mini-Uzi I'm not interested. Remaining on te topic of maps, and brining it back to community support, I've seen Tina and Candice reply to tweets that praise them brining back the maps, but completely ignore anything that even resembles a complaint or even a suggestion. I sent multiple tweets to the community team, one of which suggested adding a pause function to 'solo Extinction, something that Zombies mode has when you're playing on solo, and despite constant sending, never got a reply. I also sent them stuff about how to enable the Console, and other stuff which granted they may not of known, but still, a response would have been nice. The only response I ever got out of them was when I told them they'd put an Xbox icon in one of the descriptions, aside from that, completely nothing.

DLC - I won;t say much on this, but consider this. It costs £74.98 to buy the base game and Season pass. But to buy every single micro-dlc, excluding the weapons since those will be in season pass, it costs £86.45, more than the base game and map packs. So if you want the "full experience" then you will have spent £161.43 on this game alone. Black Ops 2 had micro dlcs, but they did not exceed the price of the main game.

Summary - Ghosts is a huge let down that has not been helped by its staff at all. I feel sorry for Sledgehammer as while any game they make will be better than Ghosts, they'll literally have to make the discs out of the Holy Grail to actually redeem the series now.