Nine to Five (PC) Review

 

Nine to Five was a FPS with an innovative concept. It introduced a 3v3v3 concept with three teams of 3 players each battling each other. I had already praised a somewhat similar concept in the flawed game 'Mega Zombie', where 4 teams of players where battling each other and Zombies in a TDM gamemode. Nine to Five on the other hand used only 3 teams, but tried to be more of a Tactical Shooter than an arcady one. Many people compared Nine to Five to a F2P version of Rainbow Six Siege. There are certainly some similarities, but Nine to Five surely was a different game than Siege.  

Each match of Nine to Five had 3 phases with different objectives. In the first round for example the target could be to gain an object or a piece of Intel. In the second round the team, that won the first round, had to fight off the other two teams and keep the Intel in their possession. In the third round a team had to extract from the map via a helicopter. The outcome of each phase would be influencing the next phase, which is a really cool idea. All teams got rewarded to some degree with ingame currency and XP, regardless of their actual inmatch performance, which for a lot of people took away a bit of motivation, since for example winning the first two phases or the final one didn't make one team really feel like the ultimate winner. For hardcore players this must have been a bit disappointing, while it could have been an incentive for more casual players to try out the game.

The gunplay in Nine to Five was criticized by a lot of people for feeling too sluggish and not impactful enough. The gunplay definitely improved after the Beta into the Early Access launch of the game and I found it to be alright. I couldn't really spot a big difference at the full release of the game, but the gunplay didn't really bother me. At the same time I can't praise it all that much either. It ultimately fulfilled its purpose. TTK on the other hand was a bit all over the place. At the Beta it felt too slow and the beginning of Early Access it felt too fast on the other hand. It took them a while to find a somewhat competent mixture. Movement was a bit slower in comparison to some other FPS, but it fitted the tactical approach, the game was going for.

Nine to Five had a lot of different weapons, attachments and a variety of gadgets to unlock. A big portion of these weapons and gadgets could be unlocked via leveling contracts for one of 3 (later 4) different corporations. There were however unfortunately RNG elements involved. Sometimes you could only get a random weapon upgrade and attachment and it could take a long time to unlock the setup of your choice. On the other hand you could invest real money to straight out buy weapons with the best attachments in the game. This was undoubtedly Pay-to-Win and negatively influenced the balancing in the game. I am always surprised, but there were a good amount of people defending this system and stating, that you could also unlock these attachments and weapons by grinding for dozens and dozens of hours instead. P2W doesn't mean that you can't get the same stuff after committing to insane grinds, but it is simply referring to having big instant advantages from using your credit card.

The gadgets in Nine to Five were pretty cool. You had for example recon drones, placeable barricades, a variety of trip mines, traps, med kits and grenades.

The maps in Nine to Five weren't too many (only 4), but they were all actually really well-designed in general. I say in general, because it was fun to traverse the maps, but they were probably a bit too large for 3 teams of 3 players. Since this was tactical shooter, you couldn't just run all over the place and had to be a bit more careful while approaching the next objective, which could, same as finding the other teams, take a while on the relatively large maps. I nonetheless really liked them, because they got a lot of details and seemed well put together.

Another aspect worth praising was in my opinion the humour in the game. Some people found it to be a bit too forced, but I generally did enjoy it.

I heard a lot of players criticizing a too heavy focus on Events/LTMs and selling skins/weapons instead of fixing the core gameplay/balancing and I have to somewhat agree. Even though I did enjoy the Battle Royale inspired 'Rogue Shift' LTM for example, I actually saw more Event messages on Steam than actual meaningful patch notes.

What did stop me from playing a couple of times, was matching up with random teammates against experienced Trios of players, who had clearly bought the best weapons and armour from the ingame store. The smaller playerbase made this balancing issue even worse. Nine to Five had some alpha tests in 2020, but the real Early Access start was in 2021. The playercount even in its best times was never over 1000 simultaneous players and for the most part of 2021 and 2022 was below 100 players, which meant you had a good chance of meeting the same dedicated players every time (unless of course you couldn't even start a match). Games with small playerbases like Nine to Five highlight the skill gaps between the players and make it very difficult for them to ever recover. Even promoting a full release in 2022 didn't significantly change anything and the game finally shutdown its servers on the 18th of January 2023.

 

Pro:

+ Unique 3v3v3 concept

+ Great variety of weapons and gadgets

+ Well designed maps (but too few)

 

Contra:

- Gameplay refinement took too long

- P2W issues

- Lack of players (skill gap)

 

Result:

Nine to Five had a unique concept, but the developers really struggled in the beginning to get the gunplay in a good shape, which turned a lot of players off the game. Unfortunately Pay to Win issues and the coherent lack of players truly hurt the gameplay experience. At the end there were probably too many holes in the boat and the devs weren't able to fix them before the ship sank to the bottom of the ocean. Even though I enjoyed playing Nine to Five, it was disappointing to see that the game was never able to match its true potential.

 

6.5/10

Lifeblood (PC) Review

 

Lifeblood is a mix of a Fantasy MMORPG and a Battle Royale game. It has the UI of an MMORPG with a taskbar of different abilities and attacks, and it focuses on gathering of resources and crafting, but all of that within the context of a Battle Royale match. The gameplay had a lot of similarities with MMORPGs and looks in some aspects like a prototype for Shadow Arena. That being said this MMORPG gameplay style will obviously also draw players away and I personally don't really believe it is best fit for a BR game.

Lifeblood allows players to choose between four different classes (Berserker, Spellslinger, Assassin or Ranger), which come with different abilities. Players however can individualize their role by using different weapons or armour sets. The game aims for a team focus by allowing abilities of different players to be combined in order to be more effective. The only playable mode was therefore Trio, but the devs were planning to also implement Solos and non-BR modes as well. The game world consisted mostly of a large forest area with some individual rocks and houses in it. The environment overall looked decently nice, but did lack details and some areas were also way too empty. As a starting point however it probably did get the job done.

The aspects, which were most praised were the character creator (which apparently offered a lot of options) and the crafting system, where you had to gather resources from the environment to forge armours or weapons.

Some of the biggest weakspots of the game on the hand were the clunky movement in combat and the awful framerate (20 FPS or less in combat) and constant motion blur of the game. The performance was really not stable and probably scared most players away (in combination with the 12 Euro asking price for a very Early Access game).

The game always had a problem to maintain a playerbase. All-time peak was 18 and a month after release Lifeblood never got more than 1-2 concurrent players. Only around 3 months after release (in January 2019) Lifeblood already had to close down the servers permanently due to low player numbers and connected financial reasons. The shady part is, that the game is still being sold on the Steam store. According to the devs there is nothing they can do to remove it from Steam, even though I have seen many other Steam games being removed after server shutdowns...

 

Result:

The idea of mixing Fantasy MMORPG and Battle Royale was not bad, but Lifeblood didn't manage to execute it in the best way. The game had potential, but few people even tried it out and most of them were probably scared away by the awful performance and clunky movement. MMORPGs with skill bars and a strong focus on crafting and resource collecting will probably never become mainstream in the BR genre, but Lifeblood could have certainly been more successful with a better execution.

 

3.5/10

The Prison Experiment (PC) Review

 

The Prison Experiment is a Battle Royale inside a prison complex. This setting sounds really promising, unfortunately the game can't really deliver on it. There are two modes in this game 'Classic Battle Royale' and 'King of the Cell Block'. Both modes feature a maximum of 50 players and can only be played solo (squads was planned as well, but never got implemented). Classic follows the basic BR formula, where cell blocks close as the way of reducing the playable area (the cell block doors of that section actually close permanently, preventing trapped players from escaping). The big problem here however is, that the game doesn't indicate which cell block is going to close next and there is also nothing like an ingame map. In King of the Cell Block, players are split up into 5 different cell blocks and the winners of each cell block fight off in final confrontation in a sixth cell block. This is actually a really cool idea, which regrettably also suffers from the games poor execution.

The map design of the prison is actually not bad (even though I would like the prison to be a bit bigger than it is). The cell blocks do look differently to each other and there are couple of other areas like the cafeteria, the showers or the prison courtyard. Visuals in general are probably under average, but also not a complete disaster. Far more problematic is the gameplay. Movement is extremely stiff and the walking animation just looks wrong and not smooth at all. The weapon variety is alright, but all weapons do make the exact same sound effect, which is really disappointing. Even more troublesome is the gunplay. The bullet pattern is awful and follows no logic. Bullets just randomly fly somewhere. There is no real scope-in function and no way to shoot precisely. Other big problems are the price point and lack of a playerbase. The game released in this state and asked for around 15 Dollars/Euro as an entrance price, which immediately killed the game. Nowadays Prison Experiment can be bought for around 2 Dollars, but in comparison to all the great free games, this is still pointless. There are no players left and no updates have ever been released for the game. 

 

Result:

I like the scenario and the idea of King of the Cell Block is pretty cool, but the movement and gunplay are unfortunately awful. Yet another cool concept ruined by bad gameplay. 

 

3/10

Bounty Game (PC) Review

 

Bounty Game was a new Battle Royale game (full release in late December 2022), that could best be described as 'Squid Game' meets 'Alice in Wonderland', the Chinese version. Bounty Game was one of the BR games, that consists of multiple minigames in different rounds to eliminate more and more players each stage, till you find an ultimate survivor, similar to Fall Guys, Squid Game or Crab Game. The strongest source of inspiration was clearly Squid Game, from which Bounty game straight out ripped off multiple rounds. There was for example the famous green light, red light minigame, just with chess board pieces instead of lasers. The glass bridge from Squid Game was also present just with dices instead of glass and the default outfit of all characters was also suspiciously similar to that of the famous Netflix show.

The Alice in Wonderland influence showed itself in the absolute insanity of some of the minigames. Everything seemed extremely weird, but somehow still managed to develop an obscure charm. Golden bells, dices and poker chips played an important role in many of them. In one minigame you had to ride children carousel horses like bumper cars, one was a whack-a-mole round, in another one you had to platform on time wheels. There were a lot of platforming minigames, in which you had to jump on dices, or dodge lasers. Combat was also an important element in many minigames. Some would even allow you to use a gun, but most relied on melee weapons. Every player could choose for every minigame between 3 different weapons (a baseball bat, a pair of boxing gloves, or a pitchfork). The first two could knock opponents back and potentially into a pit, the pitchfork on the other hand could for a short time carry another player to possibly drop him off the map. There were also really obscure dodgeball and even tank minigames. In one Casino minigame you had to flip coins in arcade machines. I didn't even understand that one, but still managed to somehow qualify for the next round. Really cool was also a minigame, in which players were aligned in a circle and players took turns with a gun, that had half their bullets to be lethal and the other half to be blankets. That Russian roulette was a pretty fun idea.

It is just a shame, that movement and combat were not really the game's strongest aspects. Both felt pretty imprecise and delayed, but just stable enough to still be somewhat enjoyable. This unfortunately got worsened by the game's server problem. There was only one Chinese server, which meant western players had a massive Ping disadvantage. I got somewhat lucky with only 170ms, but even that is horrible in platform based levels. Without at least one European or Northamerican server it would have been difficult for Bounty Game to survive. The server structure was probably one of the main reasons for the lack of players. 10 players were required to start a match and 50 was the maximum. Since the F2P release we had been seeing massive drops in player numbers, which made it in very early 2023 already impossible at some parts of the day to even start a match. I was nonetheless shocked, that the game officially shutdown its servers without prior notice on the 4th of January 2023, not even 2 weeks after the F2P Full Launch of the game.

Let's take a short moment to talk about cosmetics in this game. You could unlock dollars and poker chips just through playing, but required a lot of them to even open a single cosmetic lootbox (massive grind to even open one lootbox and you get spamed with them). Skins could alternatively also be bought with chips, which you could also gather with real money. Pretty predatory monetization scheme, but nothing we wouldn't be expecting from a Chinese game and it is at least only effecting cosmetics.

Bounty Game got two different game modes. Free mode, which was free of charge and the only one really being played, or Standard mode, which cost an entrance fee of poker chips, but also gave a much bigger prize money to the winner. That being said I reached a Finale stage a couple of times, but it was always the same and I never came even close in completing it and neither did anybody in my lobby. Maybe I just got unlucky, but the finale stage required many difficult precise jumps and that proved to be impossible with my Ping.

 

Result:

Bounty Game is like an obscure Chinese rip-off of Squid Games. It manages to make Crab Game look like a serious and well structured alternative. Even though every minigame was rather odd and obscure, the game still developed a certain charm. Bounty Game was like watching an odd Asian television game show. You have no idea what is going and  something like this would certainly not get released in your country, but it still looks entertaining enough, that you don't want to zip to another channel. Bounty Game was no masterpiece, but it might have been able to find a small niche for itself. The decision to exclusively use Chinese servers on the other hand sadly killed all potential the game had.

 

6/10

Amber Battle Royale (PC)

 

Amber Battle Royale is a new BR game on Steam, that released in December 2022 and claims to be the next generation of Battle Royale Games. A fellow Reviewer called it "Scuffed Fortnite" and that seems much more appropriate.

Amber Battle Royale isn't terrible at anything, it sadly isn't really good at anything either. Visuals are okay, Gunplay is okay, Movement is okay. There are definitely much worse BR games out there, but I could also easily name you 50 better ones. Amber Battle Royale has a Jetpack (hardly a unique aspect), but it at least works well and could potentially make fights a bit more interesting.

The self-proclaimed 200 player BR is also suffering from a massive playerbase issue. At the peak the game had 8 concurrent players, but in the last week the maximum was 3 and for the most part there are 0 players. To be fair, the map is way, way, way too small for 200 players anyway. I don't even think you could realistically fit 20 on it.

If you have a couple of friends to play Amber with, you could try this out without having too much of a bad time. You could however just try one of the dozens of better BR games with your friends instead. Amber Battle Royale gets the most okay score of 

 

5/10

 

Amber 2024 Update:

Amber has in an update last year added some NPCs to the original map (no real Bot opponents though). The playerbase is even deader in 2024 than it already was in 2023. Furthermore there was a second map added to the game, but it unfortunately is only an advertising place for NFTs and Crypto currencies. This is annoying and since I probably overvalued Amber a little bit in my original review, I am going to reduce the score to a 4.5/10.