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
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