Blitz Brigade Review

As someone who usually tends to stay away from the mobile gaming market, this title seemed to really appeal to me. It wasn't trying to appeal to the hardcore audiences, it knew what it was. From first glance, in my mind, looked like a blatant copy off Valve's Team Fortress 2. But besides the goofy, cartoon graphics, there was no big similarly between the two tittles besides being first person shooters.

So, I've had my fair share of free to play or "freemium" games, and frankly I'm not a huge fan of them (Besides Valve's free to play model). I hate the idea of "pay to win" games, allowing players to gain an advantage simply because they used real money.

Blitz Brigade has a bad balance of the free to play aspect. Most of the unlock advantages are tied to your Skill Tree, which I feel gives huge advantage to players who choose pay. Choosing to spent Diamonds (their real money currency) on the Skill Tree can potentially grant huge advantages, such as 50% extra damage and 40% extra critical chance. There are also still some items in the store that are HUGELY unbalanced, such as the Invincibility Tonic, which grants immunity from damage for 5 seconds.

However, the game does give players a generous amount of Diamonds. But you should know that the pay to win aspect is there, and probably won't go away anytime soon.

To describe Blitz Brigade, it's like Team Fortress 2 mixed together with Call of Duty and a bunch of shitty free to play first person shooter titles.

Blitz Brigade's gameplay and mechanics are very similar to the popular FPS game, Call of Duty. It's a very fast paced game, that features unlimited sprinting and high damage weapons. In my opinion, this was an excellent aspect Gameloft chose to incorporate into the game. Having a chaotic fun, fast paced shooter is what made Call of Duty the best selling FPS franchise. So I can see why they chose to follow this path, especially since mobile gamers want a fast casual game they can play on the bus.

What I felt was redundant was the ability to aim-down-sight. Usually when FPS games have this option, it gives players more precision with their shots, with the trade off being obstructed by your gun. But from what I've noticed, the there's no added accuracy nor precision when aiming down sight compared to firing from the hip. Compared to Call of Duty, there's no fluidity from when you sprint, aim down sight, fire, then go back to sprinting. There's a very noticeable delay when you go from sprinting to aiming down sight and then firing.

The characters are reminiscent of Team Fortress 2's. There's Soldier, Gunner (TF2's Heavy), Medic, Stealth (TF2's Spy), and Sniper. But besides having similar names, they aren't at all similar. The medic for example runs the fastest, and deals high amounts of damage from his Medic Gun. And Stealth throws ninja stars, so there's that.

There's 4 different maps (2 small and 2 big), and 3 typical game modes: Death Match, Capture the flag, and Call of Duty's Domination. I like objective based gaming, so CTF and Domination are my go-to modes. Nothing else to say really, oh and there's vehicles and shit too.

Depending on what time of the day you play on, you will probably see this pop up on your screen ever so often. It usually means Gameloft is having a game update or a server maintenance, quite standard for MMO games. This seems to the biggest complaint I've seen from the community, and I can see why. It's not the fact that the game is hugely unbalanced, lets also forget that you can basically pay to win. What's really holding back this game is simply being able to play the damned thing. It may sound like I hate the game, but I'm actually having a blast playing this game.

Blitz Brigade is a very enjoyable game, plagued with the pay to win aspect. But with today's age of over saturated mobile games, I can see why they chose to use this model. Blitz Brigade has a lot of potential, but the server downtime has killed the momentum of this game.

Pros:

• Lots of customization
• Call of Duty like gameplay
• Fast paced, tongue in cheek gaming

Cons:

• Very unbalanced
• Pay to win
• Inconsistent servers

Overall rating: ★★★½