Loadout Review and Tips

So Loadout finally has come out on Steam and is getting blown up on Twitch. But is it worth your time?  I will be stepping you through the cool parts and the lame parts of Loadout here along with a few tips to make your start a little more fun.

TIPS

First: If you’re going to play right now, make sure you host your own lobby.  With the growing popularity of the game, and the servers being overloaded, hosting your own lobby (though it may take a little longer to find a match–most times it didn’t) is well worth it because if the host quits in the middle of a match, you lose all your XP and any Blutes you earned.  The fastest matches and most reliable ones are with bots, unfortunately.

Second: Learn the type of game you are playing. The match that gets my blood going the most is Death Snatch, which is just like team deathmatch, but you have to collect something from the enemy (like in COD where you have to get their dog tags).

My second favorite is extraction; in this match, each team has a person who is able to gather resources and deposit them, and the team who gathers the most wins. What I find frustrating is many people don’t grasp that this is how you win, so it can be annoying at times.  

The last type of match is a typical capture the point before the other team is able to. What I don’t like about this type of match is that you don’t need to defend, so if the team has a bunch of people, but your team is making a heavy push, the minute they capture it there is no point in continuing the fight because they don’t have to defend it for any given period.

Third: Last but not least, remember your grenades–they do huge damage and come in handy, and many people forget to use them in the heat of battle.  Just smash “C” or remap it to something easier to remember, as I did.  Also, double-tapping W, A, S, D makes you dive role, as does “Ctrl.”  One big tip is you can pick up friendly weapons and use them, which can come in handy when you’re trying to hit a target far away with your rifle and your teammate, who had the rocket launcher, just got blasted.  

LIKES:

One of my favorite options is you can customize your weapon AND try it before you buy it, so you can slap on all of your dream attachments and tweak it to your play style.  Here is a short-ish video I made that runs through a few of the weapons and their mods:

The gameplay is very chaotic, which makes it a lot of fun when playing with a good group of friends or people who know what they are doing, but very frustrating when playing with people who don’t know what to do.  The game has some very funny graphics and some interesting victory dances.  With the ability to blow a guy’s arm off and watch him bleed out or evaporate his head so all that is left is his brain and eyes (yes he can still kill you when that is all that remains of his head), this game is for mature audiences but is entertaining.

DISLIKES:

My major dislikes are you can’t crouch, which bugs the hell out of me and means you’re stuck taking damage or sprinting to large cover, which is also annoying.  Also, 99% of the killing is done while diving or in mid-air; it reminds me of Halo and makes me almost nauseous trying to chase down a guy jumping all over my screen.  

It’s unfortunate that this game’s major gameplay is what drives me nuts because if you’re able to look past the inability to log on and play in a normal time frame (which should get better), the graphics and customization of weapons can be a lot of fun.  

In the end, it’s a more cartoonish version of Team Fortress 2 with a better weapons crafting system.