Reviews

Ghosts of Tsushima is a really fun open world experience with truly breathtaking natural environments and brilliant fighting gameplay. Right from the beginning, the game begs for you to explore its vibrant and dense open world. There are so many cool places to discover, shrines to climb, foxes to catch, and areas to ease your busy mind. These activities are heaps of fun and are arguably one of the best things about the game.

 Combat in Ghosts of Tsushima is by far its biggest selling point. It is challenging, however it is also very rewarding. It is awesome just how many tools it offers the player in how they should fight enemies. The stances work super well and allow the combat to always feel intense and demanding of skill and attention. The archery is really good and the ability to slow down time for short durations before firing makes it quite useful in combat scenarios (especially for dogs). I would recommend changing the game's difficulty to 'Hard' around midway through as combat can get pretty easy once you level up Jin past level two or three.

 The main story in the game is solid and features many epic missions that have you fight waves and waves of enemies in somewhat varied combat scenarios. The lead characters are quite well developed as well, however I never found myself caring too much for them.

 One issue that Ghosts of Tsushima has is that its side missions can feel very repetitive. They all seem to use the same game mechanics used in the main missions and repeat them over and over in quite boring and uninteresting activities. Before I begun playing the main missions in the game I spent many hours completing side activities. In doing this I was able to realise the fairly obvious lack of diversity in the game's mission design. Most missions have you fight some enemies, search a house for clues, follow some footprints, climb something, then fight some more enemies and save some hostages. This repeated throughout the entire game with fairly limited variation. It is a flaw that many open world games suffer from, especially now that there are so many of them releasing each year.

Despite its flaws, Ghosts of Tsushima is still a solid gaming experience that is definitely worth picking up. If I could recommend anything, maybe avoid the side missions and spend your time either exploring or doing the main missions.

This is a painful game to review because I've put 650 hours into this game and I actually agree with a lot of the points made by the positive reviewers.  The music and atmosphere is very well done, the game has a rich history and a lively community, the core classes are well-balanced, and much of the gameplay has been polished into a bright sheen.  How can I give this game a negative review given my personal history and these positive elements?

Well, the reality is that the core matchmaking and gameplay has gotten steadily worse through the years to the point where, today, I wouldn't recommend the game to anyone unless they are interested in the history or just curious about trying the game.  The basic challenge is that Valve clearly no longer wants to put any time or energy into managing the game, resulting in:
* No updates for an absurd length of time to the gameplay or lore (either in the not-so-recent past or in the forseeable future).  While the core characters are pretty well-balanced at this point, the game gets boring when months pass without any new maps, guns, or features being added.  
* A growing spambot/cheating problem.  Gone are the days when aimbots and spammers were culled due to improvements to either the Valve Anti-Cheat system or better moderation.  Instead, these problems are endemic, to the point where a large portion of games are ruined by these items and a good proportion of even satisfactory games are spent trying to get the other team to kick their aimbot so they don't walk away with an easy victory.
* To deal with the spambot problem, you now have to pay to use the core text/voice chat functionality, which is pretty necessary to perform basic gameplay coordination and is a pretty basic F2P feature.  Okay, you can go Premium for $5 to fix this, but given the issues above this is another strike against the game.  (Also, yeah, I was F2P for that entire time, but this wasn't an issue until recent updates).
* Matchmaking is completely broken.  While joining a game originally lead you to a decently full server about to start and a lively game, half the time you now join a game that is being plagued with auto-aim bots, that's half empty, or that's about to end.  Again, this is something that even Valve's other major F2P property (Dota 2) can figure out even matching players by skill level, so the lack of care here is further indicative of Valve's lack of investment.  

Given all of these issues, I don't think the game is very interesting or fun to play any more.  While existing fans of the game may want to continue playing for their own reasons, my rating reflects my judgement that this game just isn't worth the time anymore.  Not recommended. 

Edited:  I’m bumping this up because they’ve fixed the aim bot and cheating problem to the point where queueing into a causal match is no longer fundamentally broken.  I’m playing this again and enjoying it even though the way they broke communication is annoying, it’s still not being updated, and there are still cheaters every match or two.  

Overall an excellent game, although be forewarned that it's more intense than its board game counterpart.

This is an excellent adaptation of the Secret Hitler board game.  While there are occasional bugs, the core gameplay is very solid (with some interesting variations on the standard game's mechanisms and the ability to create custom games with your own rule set).  The moderators on the site are very responsive and there's isn't the mess of game-throwing, toxic chat conversations, and cheating that you find in other free online multiplayer games of this type. 

The strongest aspect of the game is still the strength of the source material, as Secret Hitler is an excellent social deduction game with just the right mix of randomness and strategy to make each game interesting.  Surprisingly moving conversations over to chat makes the game stronger rather than weaker, as "tells" are harder to identify and information about past play allows players to concoct wilder theories than they could playing in-person.

My pet peeve about the game is that most tables are ranked (and it's pretty hard to fill up a casual server), which means that the casual fun atmosphere of the in-person board game doesn't really come across in this adaptation.  Players on your team will vent if you play suboptimally, and trying new strategies or experimenting with the game is extremely discouraged in ranked (learn "meta" before playing if you're new).  Given that, it's probably not the best game if you want to zone out after work, but the rich gameplay and variety of different game modes means that players of any skill level can find something here to interest them.

This is probably the best execution of a free casual web battle royale game possible, but unfortunately the limitations of both the battle royale genre and browser gaming lead to an end product that's mostly disappointing.

It's worth starting with what's good:  the developers have clearly poured their hearts and souls into the game, there are frequent updates that introduce new concepts and locations.  The entire idea of having new procedurally generated maps in each game adds much needed variety to the game, and the quick length of game makes this a perfect distraction for a few moments over lunch or right before bed.

Unfortunately, my main criticism of this game is that there isn't a huge variety of gameplay.  Each game is essentially a collection mixed with PvP shooting, and essentially your status in the game is determined by how well you can run around the map, collect items, aim, and shoot people.   For example, hiding is difficult given that individual structures and buildings spawn in predictable ways the fact that most structures you could hide in will reveal you in subtle ways if you move around in them.  

Thus, if you don't have high-level items or you don't have a much faster reaction time than your opponent, you will lose in your confrontations with them 95% of the time.  It's pretty clear which weapons are better than others, which means that RNG determines a very large proportion of the game's eventual victors.  Even when you kill a player in a better position due to luck, it doesn't feel earned due to the random nature of the victory.

On top of this, the developers have not been great about stopping cheaters (you can Google to find a huge number of tools assisting players at beating the game), and a steadily increasing amount of extraneous junk have transformed a five minute distraction into yet enough bottomless bowl of XP, missions, and season passes that urge you to play longer.  Overall, not recommended.