izigame.me

UPDATE (January 18, 2022)
A bit more than a month has passed since the December update came out and the "ghost bullets" hotfix went live 5 days ago and I've gotten a few requests from people to update my review, so I've finally decided to do it.
It is January 18, 2022 and here's my go at B4B number two, I am going to look back at my previously mentioned points and give an update if anything has changed, become worse or better. Unfortunately, I had to delete some of my older text to not go past the maximum amount of characters allowed in a review.
-"Ghost bullets" - This particular game breaking bug/glitch, whatever you want to call it, was "introduced" in the December update and it caused your bullets to not deal any damage to ridden at times. Apparently, the cause of it was having a high/fluctuating ping. Seemingly, this issue as of January 13, 2022 has been fixed. Took the devs a month to fix it. Is that a good indicator?
-Difficulty scaling. Difficulty has become a tad more balanced and less annoying now, although I can't comment on every difficulty level as I only play on Nightmare. You can read the full patch notes here: https://steamcommunity.com/games/924970/announcements/detail/3137318082755038235
Anyway, regarding Nightmare - you can finally play the game without speed decks and actually get somewhere. Sure, there are still some parts where decks built around speed always perform better (no Breaker maps, get from point A to point B + infinite horde scenarios), but, overall, Nightmare is a much more pleasant experience now.
-The meta. No changes. Speed decks are still as powerful as they were before. Yes, speed decks got nerfed a little bit in the December patch, but the changes are practically unnoticeable. And this is coming from someone that has "spedran" all the acts multiple times. You can barely feel any difference since Nightmare mode itself has been balanced out (specials, normal ridden etc.). Of course you need to know proper routing and kiting spots to be a top quality runner, otherwise you will fail miserably, but this all can be practised.
-RNG, Special ridden & Spawn rate - Improvements can be noticed here. Sure, this game is still very heavily RNG based, e.g. getting the wrong Corruption cards, specials spawning in your face, but it doesn't feel as unfair as it felt before since the total amount of special ridden that can spawn at once has been reduced and normal ridden damage has been nerfed. What is still an issue - spawn locations. Specials can still spawn in bullshit locations, e.g. like in a bathroom behind you, when you are IN THE SAME ROOM, just 5m away from the toilet.
-Tallboy and Crusher grab range. These guys can still hit/grab you when you are 10 miles away. At certain moments, they don't even seem to care about solid objects, a grab is a grab! This also applies to the Hag.
-Lagging ridden/bad servers. Nothing has changed. Ridden still teleport and servers still lag. If you are the host of the lobby and play with people from around the world, there's a chance that the server you find won't be of appropriate location.
-Friend invite and friend list system. Still no alphabetical order, oh well.
-Stats do not properly display. Various stats still cannot be seen without using a certain website.
-Ultimate edition. Still not worth it.
-Glitches and exploits. Card duplication, infinite nades/copper exploits have now been fixed. There's still a card exploit that lets you get double the amount of cards on round one. Plus, other map related exploits still exist, but those are not too critical.
-Still no "kick player" button for the lobby host.
-Checkpoint/continue system. Not as frustrating now since "burn cards" have been added to the game which allow you to get extra continues.
-Progression system - meh. If you are a completionist you will have a bit of stuff to do but other than that, nothing too interesting to strive for, except the Apocalypse/ZWAT skins.
-Still not possible to play the game in true fullscreen mode without editing the game files.
-Solo mode. It is now possible to go through all the acts solo with bots and get achievements.
Final verdict: game is still hardly any good, but at least worth a try at this point. Try it out for $1 with Xbox Game Pass and see if you like it. Definitely not worth the Steam price tag.
Thoughts for the future: it seems like the game is slowly starting to die out, player count is decreasing everyday, judging from the statistical evidence. There is no way that the game is going to come back from the big mess that it originally was so try it out while you can. You might actually like it, or not.