izigame.me

This review is a strange one for me. I bought this game for myself, and two extra copies for a community raffle. I loved the original CoH, and I intend to keep and play this game. But I am very disappointed with this release.
My main gripes with this release are that the developers changed very little, communicated poorly with the community, and have made this version essentially a forced buy for anyone interested in continuing to play CoH online.
Let's address these points.
The developers have changed very little. To summarise the known changes:
-New character portraits (no option to toggle between original) for upwards of 15 characters.
-New Menu assets.
-Very slight changes to two non-impactful units from one of five factions
-Very slight nerf to one special ability (down to 30% from 50%)
-One new special ability to round out the only faction that only had 2 instead of 3.
-One new sound effect.
I love CoH, but I won't pretend that it's balance was perfect, and there were plenty of interesting directions rebalancing could have been taken, some of which the community has been speculating about for years.
Additionally, the game is notoriously a little unstable, with hangs, freezes, and disconnects a plenty. There seem to have been no changes to the stability of the game, but we can't be sure, because...
The developers have communicated very poorly with the community.
-There is no change list.
-The hype building announcements before release often contained grammatical errors, reflecting a lack of care.
-Those same announcements had some information regarding in game stats that were completely incorrect.
-The developers would pick and choose which topics they would reply to the community about. They still completely refused to comment on cross-play and rebalancing.
I would be fine with this game as an optional, slight update to an old game for old players, and a nicely packaged deal for less than the old price for new players, however...
The multiplayer, which is a huge component of this game, is not compatible with the old version. So, anyone wanting to keep playing CoH with new players must purchase this version.
To be fair to the developers, they did implement a larger discount for people who own the original version. However, ~$11 aud that I have to spend to keep doing something I love, with minimal effort and poor communication on the developers part, still feels bad.
Quite frankly, this leaves me in an odd place. The developers reached out to me and gave the discord community 5 free copies to put into a raffle, which was really lovely, and I actively defended the developers when they had an issue with the conditional refund on steam's end, and players were being impatient.
I want to like this release. I really do. But it seems so low effort that I find that hard.
I'm going to keep the game and play it. Make of that what you will.