Recent reviews by Frakster

Played it a ton during the beta.
Most fun I've had in a FPS PVP game in a long, long while.
The maps and gamemodes are fun, the gunplay and movement is tight, the destruction is insane, the player customization is great, and the 3v3v3(v3) nature of the game makes for many very interesting moments.
The launch has also been pretty damn solid for me. No server or performance issues.

And since I keep seeing some stuff being mentioned over and over again:
No, it's not a battleroyale game, nor is an extraction shooter.
And the devs did not slow the movement down, the new default FOV is just lower.

The game seems fun. Quite a lot even. But not being able to load into the game because the servers are down, or being stuck in 5 minutes of matchmaking just to get into an empty lobby (if you're lucky) is frustrating as hell.

So Starbreeze, please:
- Fix your servers
- Remove the always online bs.
- Bring crime.net back. I want to look for lobbies myself, not have the game pick me one.
- Adjust the progression system. Challenges are fine, but they shouldn't be the main way to gain EXP.

Amazing game. Up there with Half Life Alyx.

Amazing game. Loving every second of it.
Looking forward to more AC content.

Servers are back.

Solid Remaster with good QOL changes, much needed performance improvements, and some questionable, but minor visual changes.
Amazing game, worth playing.

The servers are back.
Good game. Play it.

I don't think the game is worth 40€ in its current state. It might do so in the future, and once it does I'll gladly give this game a thumbs up. But it isn't there yet.

The campaign is ~5 hours long, less if you're not looking for collectables or goofing around with the physics engine. The additional stuff (arena, tac-trial, parkour) took me another 1 1/2 hours to play through.
Boneworks took me ~16 hours to play through, and I still had some modules left I hadn't checked out at this point.
Bonelab goes for 40€.
Boneworks for 25€.

This wouldn't be a big issue if the campaign was at least good though. But nope, it was super disappointing.

It starts off good with some fun moments. Then you reach the Bonelab level which, in itself, was alright, but figuring out how to progress it was quite frustrating, but still fun once you get it. But once you reach the point where you get to collect your avatars the game reaches quite a hefty low, much lower than anything Boneworks had.
The first level was alright. The other ones though? Either boring, super frustrating, or just tedious to play through. They're all levels from various modules (arena, sandbox, experimental), where you either just drive around an empty racetrack, climb a tower with a ♥♥♥♥ ton of weird void birds constantly attacking you, or just simply walk across the moon from point A to B with nothing interesting on it, just to collect an orb at the end which unlocks a new avatar for you to play with. These levels were not built for the campaign, yet they still thought it was a good idea to put them in it. They are boring filler content.

Once I was finally done with collecting all the Avatars I expected the game to finally take off. Give me some great levels with a lot of opportunities for avatar change shenanigans. 2 levels is all we got. 2 super linear levels. And then the game ends with Jimmy, your new friend, telling you to check out some custom made content. Too bad there is none at this point. And I don't count map imports from GMod as actual content. If I wanted to play them, I could have done so in Boneworks.

And the real campaign levels are not amazing either. They're not bad, but quite... underwhelming? At least compared to most stuff in Boneworks. They're linear, simple, and have quite a lot less interactive components in them. Feels like they went easier on the overall level design for it to be able to run on the Quest 2.

And I haven't even mentioned the bugs yet. I lost count on how many times I got stuck in the ground. All(?) of the new rifles and shotguns cause your left arm to glitch around, making it impossible to hit stuff at times. My left controller keeps losing its ability to grab objects in the game. I almost had to restart the whole ending sequence because my head clipped through the roof of a car, leaving me stuck. But none of this would be a deal breaker for me if the content was actually good. Some of it is, but most isn't.

You're paying for the future of the game. For the updates, for the upcoming mods, and to fund their other upcoming projects (DeadFM, Hall of the Machine King). Bonelab might be worth the 40€ once the modded content starts flowing in, and once SLZ adds some more polish to it, maybe even some content, but its current state is just disappointing.

Just play Boneworks for now.

Servers are back online.

Time for some PvP.

9,5/10

Maybe next year

Update (17.05.2023):
Solid shooter with a lack of new content, but there's still a lot of fun to be had here.
And it's without a doubt a Battlefield game, just not exactly the one I expected, or wanted to get after BF5.
Buy during sale.

Still going to give it a thumbs down though, because of one missing feature:
A server browser.
And I mean a good server browser, not the clunky abomination that is present in the Portal section. I want to pick from a list of official servers, with the official set of rules, and the official map rotation. Having a matchmaking playlist alongside a server browser worked just fine in BF5. Why can't we have that in 2042 Dice?
I'm tired of getting repeatedly thrown into Maps I don't want to play on, and not seeing my favourite maps for weeks or even months at a time.

Dice, please, add a server browser.

Update (15.08.2024):
With the games support now officially having come to an end without having received a server browser update for AOW, my review will remain unchanged.
Sucks big time.
Dice and EA, please don't mess up BF6.