In the Name of the Tsar Review
By now people have heard or played the new DLC that has arrived at Battlefield 1. If you know anything about traditional Russian maps, weapons, and voices than you’ll be right at home here.
Sorry no “cyka blyat” or at least I haven’t heard anyone say that (in game voices that is, people already say it too much in chat.)
Since it’s not the end of the two week “premium only” embargo…if you’d like to call it that…this review isn’t taking into the (possible) future account of no one is playing the DLC. Since “They Shall Not Pass” DLC came and went in the same amount of time, it’s very possible that this DLC will do the same although personally I hope it doesn’t. But time will tell, quite soon.
As with anything classically Russian, so it continues in Battlefield 1. Odd but interesting weapons. How about a sawed-off rifle pistol? How about an LMG that has a hopper for 120 rounds with 20-round stripper clips dropped on top? Well you get your wish. While that LMG is not Russian in nature (Italian) it still fits with the Russian theme of “Lets try something different” or indeed that era of man.
Very cold but pretty maps.
My favorite Battlefield game to come out since the first was 2142 and with that the Russian voices have stuck with me since then. So hearing the proper Russian again is a welcoming sound for me. I know Russian voices were in BC 2, 3, and 4 but YOUR voice was English with a Russian accent and all the other voices you heard were (in) Russian but again were just English speakers speaking Russian and also very quiet to hear (because of all the gun fire, explosions, distance, etc.) Now we have proper Russian (or really good voice actors of which I can’t tell the difference) for every aspect of the game, including yourself. With that simple addition the connection to classic Battlefield (2142) already got a bit better.
As for the maps, it’s a very nice change from the standard Western maps we’ve been use to since launch. We also get another trench-like map which I’ve seen either people love or hate it. On the Operation’s version of that same map…lots and lots and LOTs of hate from me and everyone from the attacking side simply because the defenders start in the trenches with all the cover you need and the attackers start behind a (destructible) rock fence and one attack vehicle and nothing else. The three times I’ve attempted to play it on Operation (which to be completely honest was amazing in and of itself to find an OP for the DLC) the attackers have never made it past the first sector even when the armored train shows up. I haven’t tried any Rush version of the map but I swear I tried just no server is running it.
SMG 08/18: Slow but hits hard.
As for the weapons, as mentioned earlier, the guns are very Russian. And unlike “They Shall Not Pass” which were all slow firing and heavy hitting guns, the Russians are a bit in between. The Parabellum LMG fires 100 rounds faster than the BAR, kicks like something out of a cartoon and overheats extremely quickly but the Perino LMG fires slowly with very little recoil. The medic gets a new automatic weapon, the Fedorov Avtomat which is very welcomed by me because I like playing medic and giving me something to defend myself against all the other automatic weapons in the game (I know, I know not historically accurate) is very nice. But you also get the General Liu rifle if don’t like automatic weapons which has a 6 round stripper clip and is pretty powerful but obviously lacking in the front line potential because of the limited ammunition.
Fedorov Avtomat: Nice automatic, kicks like a mule.
The Obrez pistol and Nagant Revolver are great “one more hit to kill” type weapons but obviously are not entirely front line weapons because they take so long to reload and there limited range but the Obrez, being a sawed-off rifle, means it does use the “sweet spot mechanic” but that spot is right in front of you (5 meters) and extremely small so don’t expect to snipe with it. The Mosin-Nagant and Vetterli-Vitali rifles are actually quite fun to use for the sniper, especially the Nagant since it gets unique reload animations depending on the amount of bullets left which are pretty interesting. As for the new SMG 08/18, it feels like a LMG with the amount of bullets and the (slow) fire rate but it feel like the size and accuracy of a pistol. As for the new shotgun, it’s really whether you can handle only two shots per reload as it is a non-sawed off shotgun with two variants, buckshot and slugs and yes you can fire both barrels at once.
The new maps, especially in Operations, are very big.
Now we’re going to start going downhill here to the negatives of this. As nothing is ever so simple in this version of Battlefield, to get these weapons you don’t have to “level up” a class or be a certain rank or anything, you have to do certain things to unlock them. Which, depending on what you’re trying to unlock is either extremely easy or extremely frustrating. For example, to get one of the two variants of the SMG, you have to kill a certain amount of people with a certain SMG and get a number of kills with the anti-tank grenade. Please note that says “kills” not “tank kills” so that means just spam the grenade in any direction, get kills, you get the gun, easy right? The other variant of the weapon? Kill a number of people with a different weapon but also get 5 tank kills with mines. Please note that says “tank kills” not just “kills.” And I don’t know about you but since playing from the start I’ve gotten no more than maybe 3 tank kills with mines, many kills in those tanks but only 3 tanks destroyed. If it was “get 5 kills with mines” I wouldn’t complain since one fully loaded tank will have that many people in it or an armored car.
General Liu: Decent but limited ammo.
Another one to complaint about would be the Mosin Marksman variant needing 15 kills with the Trip wire bomb which since it does a maximum of 80 damage on detonation (or as it seems in my case of 72 damage) it’s not easy to get a kill with it. Since the DLC dropped I’ve gotten a total of 3 kills with it and 5 or more “hit, no kill” which is EXTREMELY frustrating when you really want to try out the scoped version of it and not the infantry version. The rest of the weapons are very easy to get with there simple “kill things with things that kill” requirements.
Parabellum: Faster than the BAR, kicks like something out of a cartoon, overheats QUICKLY.
However the new specialization that’s been added for everyone is another is another complaint with their unlock system. Luckily it’s not like the Medal system in the game (where you can only work on one medal at a time instead of just all at once) and everything you do is tracked whether or not you actually selected “track” at the main menu. Just generally playing the game as each of the classes is fairly easy to do to unlock the specialization system but if there is something you like (ex: I want the squad members drop smoke on death for the medic perk) but in order to do that you have to more things to unlock which you’d think would be fairly simple right?
Vetterli: Interesting close range weapon.
How ’bout get 5 kills with the syringe? Or win a round of Rush? There are 6 things you can do for each perk and only 5 of them need to be done in order to unlock the perk. But in my case the, the syringe is out of the question because I’m not that type of player. Meaning going off on my own and ignoring the team, I’m as aggressive as the team around me is. Keep them alive, keep them fighting, forget about me I’ll be fine. So the next choice is to do Rush…which seems just as hard to do as the Syringe until earlier today. Out of the hundreds of Rush servers, only two showed up with people in them and their ping was 300+ (missed which country it was in) so that’s a no go as well. And even if I said “screw it” and joined them, the server browser is still broken. Servers show up and disappear constantly so those two servers would disappear at will and reappear after six or more refreshes. Lucky me a random server showed up with people and less than 90 ping and I also lucky was the fact I won the first match and joined and never did it again. But having to do map specific things or things that go against what people are use to seems a bit…bullshit. I’m not saying the Syringe thing is hard or impossible for me to do, I’m just saying I’m not that type of player and the times I ever get the chance is extremely rare and I’m sure that goes for a lot of players out there. Then the added addition of “Heal 10 different team mates” implies to me “play the game, be in squads, heal people, done.” Nope. Either it’s broken or they forgot to put the “in a round” in the description cause I heal like crazy and every match I heal everyone in site, and it never seems to count and when it does it resets. So that tells me I have to join a squad, heal all of them, leave the squad and join another then heal them…..isn’t this suppose to be a team game not a “I WANT TO UNLOCK THIS” game?
These problems are minor compared to the rest of the game, which is still extremely broken. Planes are still overpowered. Shotguns are still overpowered. Bayoneting is still broken. As mentioned above, the server browser is still broken. Suppression is still just a pain in the ass with random gun sway. And while I can’t say that ‘nade spam is broken since it has been “broken” since Bad Company 2, no matter how hard they try they can’t balance it so I don’t think it’s a “broken/overpowered” issue anymore and just a broken feature. NOT that I’m saying take it out of the game, just mean I’ve long ago stopped giving a crap about it. Balance (players, not weapons) is still non-existent in every game mode. Only in the last week have I ever seen a “balanced” conquest game where it was like 1000-998/975. The rest of the time it was 1000-200 or an Operation that was 100% one sided to the point of people leaving and the other team getting bored. And having Operations not be able to be found by the server browser is still a bad thing simply because why not actually have a way to see if people are playing the mode instead of clicking “search” and going through the endless empty servers no one waits to fill up…because no one ever shows up.
Yep, this glitch is back and it seems to happen even more than before.
And, this is neither here nor there, the behemoth extremely rarely ever changes the outcome of a battle. It still is very much a “oh it showed up? We lost/They lost” (depending on the side.) Operations make more use of this unit but again with the balancing it’ll be useful for one sector then it’s dead and the we have to wait for the next wave to take the next sector.
So in short, In the Name of the Tsar is a great addition to the game with good maps and weapons but the base problems with the game are still there. The game still is very fun to play it’s just the problems with the game that don’t make me want to play it constantly, the community is still very toxic and the player base seems to be just diving off a cliff when it comes to the number of people playing. With regards to that, it’s been nice to play a number of Operations because of all the people playing but I have a feeling when the “hype” of this new DLC disappears that will happen again, just like They Shall Not Pass.
