Project Winter Review (Paper)
I should start off by saying I love this game. I have made great friends, have had great laughs and just generally really enjoyed my time playing it.
Now for the not so pleasant parts, and unfortunately Project Winter has many of them.
Lets start with the obvious ones. There are trolls, racists, homophobes and many more unpleasant people you will meet on this game. It's a competitive game at it's nature so that is to be expected. Luckily the game does provide some ways of sorting those out (like adding them to a block list or reporting them on the community discord). What you sadly get to know is that many of the toxic, bigoted players stay in the game.
Often because they are either friends of developers and moderators or they straight up are those developers and moderators.
While on the topic of moderators, most suck, not all of them but most. They are almost all cringy teenagers with too much time and are tripping on the little power they have.
The game gets semi-frequent updates but somehow they seem to always miss the mark. The devs either change systems that didn't need changing, add systems in that seem neat on the surface but have dramatic influence on core game play mechanics that the developers obviously didn't think through. Or they removed beloved features for the sake of balancing instead of working out a better solutions.
Then there is the DLC: Blackout. Blackout offers a fun, more casual alternative to the more competitive vanilla game play. Blackout is widely know to be the unloved child by the developers. This is clear by the lack of updates it receives or the few that are made change some core mechanics that make blackout fun and unique in the first place.
The developers simply don't play blackout themselves and have no idea how to develop this DLC.
(Note: this all wouldn't matter if blackout game with the base game but they charge €6 at the time of writing)
Summery: This game has so much potential and was a great idea, but it is horrible managed. Couple this with the relative high price and a depleting player base and you get a game that is not worth buying.
I wish this game was recreated or bought out by a different game studio and the team would be replaced. I think that would be the only way to save this game.