izigame.me

Some people may be wondering why I am not recommending this game to others, given that I have played it for over 100 hours. There are many, many things to love about Foxhole. Its gameplay is unlike anything I've ever played. Foxhole is a massive war simulator inspired by WWI and II in which every building, every structure, every vehicle, every gun, every bullet is player-made. Gather raw resources, refine them into usable materials and use them to craft supplies to sustain the war effort. Whether you play frontline or backline, combat or logistics, Foxhole is a collaborative game at heart, and you won't go far if you play all alone. The satisfaction you get from seeing a project come together thanks to the efforts of a whole team of people is incredible. But those moments are merely the silver lining of a game experience which, often, is otherwise tedious and frustrating. As it is, I simply cannot recommend Foxhole. Here are some reasons why:
1. Programming and game design issues. There is no proper tutorial. The existing tutorial only goes over the bare minimum of the commands and doesn't actually tell you how to play the game. There should be at least some semblance of a tutorial for logistics: they make up a significant portion of the game, and yet you cannot grasp logistics-related gameplay mechanics unless you pour over the wiki for hours or you know someone who's already been playing Foxhole for a while and can show you.
Also, the game physics are really rough and unrefined. There are numerous issues regarding hitboxes, people clipping into buildings and getting stuck, etc. Instead of fixing these issues, the developers... gave players access to an unstuck command, presumably because they'd rather work on more game content. Those issues would be understandable coming from an early-access game, and Foxhole was early-access for a very long time. But now the game is at update 1.53, and is supposedly officially released at this point. These problems are simply not acceptable coming from a supposedly finished game.

2. The relationship between the community and the development team. The developers are... uncommunicative, which is an issue for a game like Foxhole which depends upon a relatively small, but dedicated community of fans. I remember when the community was awaiting update 52. The game had numerous issues which made it frustrating to play. Among chief complaints were: lack of balance between the two opposing game factions (I'll get back to that one later on); slow rates for building structures; a confusing map, with many people feeling the need to use mods to make the map more readable (that is still a problem to an extent); a confusing rail switch system for trains; and a poorly-implemented new system for logistics and production revolving around facilities, which was hard to use, time-consuming, resource-hungry and desperately needed to be streamlined. The developers left the community plunged into a radio silence for months regarding this much-awaited update, which was supposed to bring many quality-of-life improvements that the game very badly needed. Eventually, frustration, resentment, anger and apathy grew and festered in the community, with "devman doesn't care" and "devman bad" sentiments being pretty widespread at that time (the latter one remains a frequent occurrence to this day).
Another issue concerns moderation. Foxhole being an MMO, it needs moderation. The moderators are... none other than the developers themselves, which in my experience only breeds suspicion of devman bias (whether real or perceived) and resentment towards the developer team. Even worse, suspicions of devman bias extend beyond the moderation aspect into the very way the game is built, with many players firmly believing that the game unfairly advantages the Colonial faction against the Warden faction. One of my friends, who played both factions, once expressed it like this: "Playing Warden is playing Foxhole on hard mode." I only play Warden, so I cannot personally assess whether this sentiment is true, but in my opinion it is too frequently expressed to ignore.
3. The behavior of the community itself. Foxhole is not spared from the toxicity issues that pretty much every online multiplayer game has to deal with. Foxhole's player base is pretty international, with not only British and American players, but also Eastern European and East Asian people, as well as a decently-sized French community. However, the game is mostly in English and the majority of the community remains English speakers. The language barrier leads English-speaking players to frequently antagonize players who are Chinese or Russian, and French players frequently complain about unnecessarily rude and sometimes xenophobic comments from English and American players.
Faction loyalism is also a major issue, with players getting too caught up in the fantasy the game sells and unnecessarily antagonizing players from the enemy faction simply for being from the enemy faction. Petty infighting about whether Colonials or Wardens are better is pretty frequent, and can sometimes morph into something deeply inappropriate, such as some players claiming that the Colonials represent the Allied forces of WWII and the Wardens represent Nazi Germany, due to a misunderstanding of the loose historical references within the game and despite developers clearly stating that the in-game factions have nothing to do with any real-life armed forces, whether historical or current.
This petty infighting even exist within factions. As Foxhole is a team game at heart, it is possible to create regiments within a faction, colloquially known as "clans", to better facilitate player coordination. Clans frequently fight each other and it is not uncommon for small "civil wars" to break out over the course of a war, despite there being restrictions placed on friendly fire (mostly in the form of restrictions, kicks and bans at the discretion of the moderators). This is not helped by the fact that the raw resources in this game are very competitive: almost all of these civil wars break out over a conflict for the securing of resources. On top of that, while some clans dedicate a significant amount of time each war to building public facilities for all to use, others hoard resources and supplies, making it harder for everyone else to play. All of these problems create antagonism between clans and between clan members and non-clan members, with "clanman bad" being another fairly common sentiment.
TL;DR: the game has major programming and design issues despite having been officially released for months; the developers are uncommunicative and appear to be favoring one faction over the other; the community struggles with toxicity despite a few silver linings when playing the game with friends.