1. The AI still isn't navigating well and the characters can't move to where they need to go, because the problems with character movement weren't resolved.

This makes Metagame easy, because I know the AI will not come get me, period, unless I suck.

It also means that a lot of the default Metagame maps remain entirely unplayable by the AI, and, as a result, are easy defensive wins.

2. ACrabs are still completely useless outside being weak, flimsy, expensive turrets that can't walk through most environments, lose their guns when you breathe on them, and, well... I still can't justify buying them.

3. Orbital bombardment never happened.

Instead, everybody gets magic shoot-down-all-the-delivery-craft-humans-never-use-anyhow droids. Who benefits? If you said, "defenders", award yourself a gold star.

4. Players can drop everywhere. Great. Players can use Drop Crates, while the AI always uses more-expensive, more-dangerous alternatives. Not so great.

5. Still can't shift-click to drop a whole squad, but instead have to laboriously scroll back to where I want the next guy, and the next guy, and...

6. Squads, when dropped, still just stand around. I can see it now:

"Hey, I heard there was some Brain thing we're supposed to go kill."

"Naw, let's stand here and wait for them to drop on our position, surround us or drop bombs. Feel like a hand of poker while we wait?"

This is, in short, a very un-fun type of micro.

7. The AI doesn't pick your bases at random; it keeps attacking the same places, over and over again, despite horrible K:D. This is like sending men over the wire in WWI.

8. The AI keeps trying to land the Brain in the same place on the map. Makes it pretty easy to shoot down, somehow.

9. The "scan now" un-feature remains a slideshow I don't need to see more than once, ever.

If you pay to Scan Now, and it's a new territory that nobody's invaded yet (about the only real use, mainly for newbies), then just load the modified version of the LOS map from disk. Don't make me sit there watching nothing interesting.

10. Weapon balance remains fairly poor. The medium rifles remain the most reliable killing tools in the game, most of the special weapons are so weak that you're better off not bothering, and they're certainly not worth their costs either in gold or weight... and I lost count of how many times I took out a Brain with nothing more potent than the Medium Digger its predecessor left behind.

I mean, yeah, sure, that 50-shot minigun the Imperatus have, it's sure powerful, but the Coalition Assault Rifle fires immediately, reloads quickly... and can bore through concrete.

11. Rocklets are still deathtraps, rockets are still deathtraps; neither gets used by the AI to pull the same stunts players can, so they're still deathtraps that give humans a huge advantage.

12. Dropships are still useless giant slow-moving fragile targets with "wasted gold" written all over them.

13. There is nothing like a tank, for those times when it would be appropriate.

14. Coalition's Lights and Heavies cannot get outside the snow-volcano fortress in Slodran Wilderness, which means that if you cap it first and spend your gold to get the rudiments of a base, you get two defenders who can't go on offense. I don't even want to know if that's how it plays for the other sides, it's pretty irksome that basic details like this weren't looked at.

15. No provisions have been made for dealing with defended targets over time. It's much easier to win the Metafight by simply making your opponent waste all their Brains and gold than to attack, and on the attack, you can still pile up 2K gold and rush the AI out 90% of the time, if you don't suck.

16. There aren't any reasons to use the special tools or gadgets, at all. There aren't doors that can't be destroyed except with an explosive pack and detonator, buildings you can't enter except by using a special tool (again, we can just use rifles to carve up bunkers, lol), and generally, if you use that stuff, it's because you're bored, not because you need to.

17. Character speeds remain so slow and the AI remains so ground-bound that a savvy jet-packer can expect to play keep-away with the AI almost indefinitely, even if they don't tunnel where the AI cannot figure out how to go.

18. The strategic AI does not select the very first battlefield at random, and therefore the defensive game can be played easily from the start, making long-term victory practically inevitable.

19. The customize-yer-base feature, which was never a great idea to begin with, because no AI can ever take serious advantage of it... well, it makes all the above worse. Spending even 1K gold on obstacle patterns that hose the AI that drops into predictable places is really easy and isn't fun, unless you honestly lack the hand-eye coordination to play the game otherwise.

20. All diggers are not created equal: some factions get diggers that cannot handle dark dirt, which makes their Brains much less able to gold-mine.

21. Speaking of gold-mining, that sub-AI remains incompetent.

22. If you go 3 v. 1, the number of minimum bases means that the player will be able to cap one, minimum, and then be able to win via grind, if nothing else, unless they're totally incompetent, because of all the above.


I am hoping that, with additional Steam sales hopefully making it worthwhile monetarily, that the fairly serious gameplay issues with CC finally get addressed and serious attention is put into making Metafight at least moderately challenging if played seriously, i.e., not with artificial rules, but as designed.

The engine's cute, the art's cute; it's not a technical problem or a content problem, it's a game-design problem. Perhaps a specialist in that area can be found to address these structural problems and repair them or offer concrete solutions.