Code2040 is a relatively new Battle Royale game, that dropped early February onto Steam. It had a couple of unique mechanics, which helped make it stand out of the crowd of BR games.
Code2040 has a Scifi scenario and all players are prison inmates, who have to work on a foreign planet and extract some resources. The inmate status is being used in an interesting way in this game. All players have an explosive collar around their necks and if they fail to authenticate regularly (all 12 minutes) at an authentification center, then they will be blown up. Code2040 maybe a Battle Royale game, but it isn't enough to just eliminate all opponents, the players also need to launch a ship to escape from the planet in order to win the match. This element actually reminded me of the earlier version of 'The Cycle' or 'Scavengers'. Code2040 also has PVE elements in the form of Ghost creatures, that will randomly attack players during the match, and a God like creature, which evokes earthquakes (it however is a bit pointless...). I personally really liked these PVE elements within the BR matches and think they were implemented well, but I can understand that some players might experience them as a bit too much.
Players could also choose from a couple of gadgets before every match, that helped to customize playstyles. A Soma Ball for example could be thrown as a Recon scanner, while heal grenades could aid an entire team of players and a shield gadget could temporarily enable an invincibility effect.
Apart from the standard Battle Royale mode (which was only available for Trios) there was multiple times a 12v12 Team Deathmatch mode (called Code2042) enabled. This mode could have been a nice addition, but unfortunately I never found enough players to start a match. Additionally the developers also created a new tutorial mode (2036 Exercise Yard), that released a few months in the games lifetime, to try out weapons.
Gunplay and movement feel fluent and precise in Code2040. It may not be the next PUBG, but the gameplay is more than just decent and I do see some comparisons with this game. Gameplay overall is just pretty enjoyable and honestly also felt rather polished. The UI was very clean and well-arranged. I appreciated the various different attachments for weapons and the amount of usable items (like grenades, adrenalin stims or health packs). All weapons also offered first and third person views, which was appreciated as well.
I can honestly state, that I liked the Battle Royale map in CODE2040 pretty much. Due to a small playerbase (more to that later on), it always felt pretty large, but I would take a big map over a tiny one any day. The grasslands were really beautiful and the cities were great places to loot and actually felt like places, where people would live (which not many BR games can claim). Apart from some POI locations, there were also authentification stations located around the map (which served as something like probation offices).
The visuals of Code2040 were actually rather beautiful, like you would wish for every 2021 videogame to have, but the visual beauty came with a price. The game was also very hardware demanding and even with good equipment you could encounter some stuttering especially during the beginning of the matches. Perhaps the performance optimization could have been improved.
Sound is another area, where CODE2040 simply did a good job. The soundtrack in the menus fitted the game well and sound effects like gunshots, the emps or footsteps were precise, clear and sounded like they were supposed to.
The first two weeks the game may had a pretty decent population of 300-400 players (which is also not that high, if you really want to hit the ground running), but since than the amount of players has been dropping lower and lower every week. A big problem with the shrinking player numbers was, that CODE2040 for a long time required a minimum of 18 players to start a match, which was later reduced to 12. This may not sound like much, but can really hurt the game in the longrun. Once there are timeframes, where there are not enough players to immediately get going, the others will lose patience in the queue and start a snowball effect, which will ultimately lead to the games demise.
On prime time matches actually got going for a long time, but even than it usually took a couple of minutes and many people lost patience during the queue. In low times on the other hand, there weren't even enough players online to get a match going in any of the three server regions (EU, US and Asia). The minimum player requirement became a serious problem, if you wanted to play outside of the prime time... Even before that, the game had a problem that it would instantly start the match as soon as 18/12 players were queuing in, which made it very difficult to ever experience a full lobby (Even with a 200 concurrent player count I never got more than 20-30 players in a match). In the first 1-2 weeks of the game's life, people were apparently really getting full lobbies, but that never happened again. The matchmaking system definitely needed to be improved (at least it always showed you how many players were searching). Splitting the queue into 3 different regions obviously didn't help a dwindling playerbase either, but they did implement an auto-queue function, that automatically lead players to the server regions with the most players (which nearly always was south-east Asia, which in turn didn't help European and American players pings). Maybe adding Bots would have been a solution, but they should have also obviously focused on promoting the game more.
Code2040 would indeed really have deserved a much bigger and better marketing campaign, since the gameplay was actually pretty strong, but you barely heard about the game anywhere. The developers didn't seem to have put out any adds or invested in Youtubers or Streamers to market their game. I am also not the biggest fan of Streamers promoting products, but you have to find a way to let people know about your game (I only accidentally discovered the game by browsing the Steam search for new games). The twitter page of the game hasn't been updated in over a year (!) and their Youtube-Channel is hidden under their company names with all videos only having Taiwanese (at least i assume it is that) subtitles and descriptions. I really have to say, the developers did an absolutely awful job at marketing the game (and they did receive a couple of offers of help from the community, which all have been ignored).
The lack of players also quickly lead to massive skill gap problem, where a lot of players already knew each other and some Squads and Players just kept winning, while the new players quickly gave up or never even found a lobby to begin with.
Since CODE2040 is a F2P game, it was also selling Skins and Battle Passes within the game to finance itself. Some cosmetics could obviously also be unlocked for free, but not very many. It is furthermore interesting since CODE2040 kind of offered two different Battle Pass versions. There is the regular Battle Pass for Season 1 and Season 2 as well as Character Level Pass (this pass unlocks additional cosmetics rewards). You needed to unlock both with the real money currency and there is no way of gaining them through just playing the game. The problem with the system is, that there often weren't enough players to even get a match going and nonetheless the devs focused on releasing this cosmetic content instead of fixing their game first.
I also experienced some technical issues in the last months of the game, which gave me a black screen at the beginning of a match or through me out of the match completely. These issues only started to pop up towards the end of the game and obviously didn't get fixed anymore.
Edit: Meanwhile the official servers for Code2040 have been shutdown, while I was writing this review (official shutdown on 10.11.2021). The last 3 months after the cancellation announcement there were never enough players online to start a match (with the exception of the last day), which is a really sad end for this overlooked game. A lot of this could have been avoided, if the devs reacted quicker or started to actually listen to their players.
Pro:
- Smooth Gunplay and movement
- Cool Scifi-Scenario
- New gameplay elements implemented well (authentication collars, shadow creatures, escape ship, individual gadgets)
- Great BR map
- Beautiful visuals
- Fitting soundtrack and sound effects
Contra:
- Small playerbase/ Long queue times (Awful marketing of the game)
- Hardware demanding game
- Skill gap?
- Too much focus on skins instead of marketing/patching
Result:
The story of Code2040 is a nearly tragic tale. The gameplay was smooth, the Scifi scenario well captured and the visuals didn't disappoint. I also really liked the authentication collars and the need to escape with a space ship from the map. The lack of support and low playerbase however quickly lead to a deadly downward spiral the game never managed to escape. Most players, who did play Code2040, liked it, but many more disliked the game, for not even being able to experience it. At this point all hope was already lost. It saddens me to see that a game like Code2040 dies so fast, but many trashy mobile BRs manage to survive for years. This game had potential, but never received the support it deserved.
6.5/10
Keine Kommentare:
Kommentar veröffentlichen