Alliance of Valiant Nitwits.
Alliance of Valiant Arms is a game that came out in 2009, so naturally the 2022 global worldwide relaunch is buggy, broken, missing features, missing content, and generally all around a buggy, incompetent launch. What an absolute shock for Neowiz, a company whose free to play games are infamous for their high quality and competent support structure. I’m just kidding, remember Bless Online?
The positive side of this impressions piece is that it’s going to be short. I didn’t play more than 30 minutes of AVA Global because it’s completely broken. The first clue that this wasn’t going to go well was that it booted in medium graphics in 720p windowed mode. And then the game had roughly six strokes in the effort it took to get it to peacefully switch to full screen 1080p. Then I did the tutorial.
On getting out of the tutorial, the game broke. You have to pick a “camp” which is some weird clan system I don’t understand but the game says to go according to your language. I couldn’t pick a camp, none of them worked. For some reason you can’t transition to the main game and actually play it without picking a camp, and picking a camp doesn’t work. I had to kill the game via task manager because there was also no way to back out.
So I shut the game down and decided on a whim to boot it back up. I get into the game without being asked to join a camp and it offers me three game modes. Three game modes? AVA had ten game modes. AVA Global has three game modes. Why? According to the developer, they cut the game modes for launch so they could get it out to the public. The 2022 relaunch of a 2009 game has 70% less game modes because it was rushed out the door. I’d like you to know I take no pride in reading that as if it’s a thing we should all just accept as happening.
So I played a match of team deathmatch and the game is about what you’d expect. A bottom tier free to play shooter from when you just kinda had to accept that free to play Counter Strike or Call of Duty clones were going to be crappier than Counter Strike but also immensely greedier, but then Counter Strike went free to play so now it’s just greedy garbage. And then the match ended and I went back to the lobby to have the game ask me…to pick a camp. Good lord.
And that’s about where my journey ended folks. Apparently Neowiz removed a lot of the pay to win aspects from this release. Unfortunately they removed a very important other part; a functioning game.
MMO Fallout 