GROUND BRANCH Reviews

Gameplay looked decent, but as of this writing there doesn't seem to be any players to play with. I had it refunded so I won't be buying it again until it's out of early access.

Its just a dress up game for men, and the game doesn't offer much than shooting dumb bots. i get its a sanbox game... but most sandbox game does a lot more, than shooting bots and running around the map looking for objectives to interact

Love the pace of this game. No fancy radars or jumping around just solid tactics to win the day.

Love the game so far. The immersion of realism from players perspective is great but the game needs more development on a couple of things. a) The AI movement is underdeveloped and gets hanged up in stairs, doorways and corners. b) The AI aiming at times feels like aim-bot with accuracy at distances that shouldn't be possible, especially with a shotgun. c) When shot at from a distance there no intersectionality in the sound. You can hear the crack and the landing of the bullet but no the direction so locating a sniper at a distance can be tricky. d) When aiming over a wall or through a window (at close proximity) the game should recognize that not only the sights / scope is able to clear the obstacle but the muzzle is clearing as well. Had multiple time that I was clearing the window but the hit box was registering the window sill or frame. Overall is a great game and supper fun to play, with a lot of potential to grow and became even more great.

This game might be good once it's finished, but currently it's a disgrace to the Early Access program. The point of Early Access is to be able to deliver the game to people when it still needs some work. This right here should be still in closed beta. You can see someone put in some effort here but I didn't see even a single thing that didn't feel like it's about to physically fall apart. The animations are extremely janky and don't feel great, things that should feel quick and snappy feel unnaturaly soft, and things that should be a fluid motion feel unnaturaly snappy. Doing a inspect magazine animation on a pistol with its slide pulled back, will make the slide magically teleport forward and then teleport back. The way your character holds the gun makes you wonder if his bones are okay.. The sounds are absolutely horrible, I didn't think that bad sound design would ever be a problem to me, but this game makes things that are close sound distant and really far away, and the things that are distant sound like they're right next to you. The NPC's lack any kind of intelligence. The game itself runs like shit and looks like a unity preset. Which is surprising how well ready or not runs for me while looking absolutely stunning. The gun customisation is just swapping some attachments, most of them act exactly the same and the only "depth" this game actually adds is the ability to move the attachemtns freely along the rail, which most of the time is completely useless. The grenade throwing system is horrible, the implementation of DLSS is extremely unstable, making the game just give up on framerate the second you use a scope with any zoom whatsoever, making it run worse than without DLSS. If you really want this game specifically, wait for it to release, though I don't think it ever will, for now just get RoN

1. GET UP 2. play game 3. die to AI with AIMBOT 3. eat/sleep/repeat

solid shooter gameplay, kind of a shooter sandbox experience, enemy AI is very funky but its still in production so that makes sense

This game is honestly an embarrassment for how long its been in development and the price they're asking. There is very little content and what is there is lacking. The single player experience is nonexistant without AI teammates like Ready or Not, and multiplayer can be fun with friends and hell with randoms, don't even bother if you don't have people you know to play with. The community is made up solely of the worst kind of tactical larpers that will teamkill if your PEQ box is the wrong colour, or god forbid you have the wrong patches, and refuse to talk like regular human beings. MilSim is fun when its not life or death serious, like people in Arma and Squad can still mess around without ruining the experience for others and being mostly realistic. There is absolutely no fun allowed here though, but you can't even get immersed because the larpers will always find something to complain about. The enemy AI is genuinely shockingly bad, it makes RoN's beta AI look sentient by comparison. Want to do room clearing like Zero Dark Thirty? Sorry, every AI in the building got stuck on the stairs so all the rooms are empty. This literally happens every single time, on every map, its pretty sad such a big issue is still in the game after the big AI pathing update. The difficulty settings don't change the behaviour whatsoever, it only changes their reaction time. Like beta RoN, the AI can either laser you through walls with one shot before you even peek the doorway, or will stand motionless and not shoot at all. They don't react to the player's actions at all unless the player is in line of sight, they don't even run from grenades, they just stand there and die. They don't communicate despite what the three or four voicelines endlessly repeated might suggest, they don't use any kind of team work, they don't use grenades, they don't take cover, they hardly even move. They feel like a pre-pre-alpha placeholder so ragdoll physics and damage can be tested, not actual AI. And fighting these guys is the entire game, so that's pretty bad. The movement and shooting are pretty janky; the game tries to replicate other tactical shooters in having your whole body and gun exist as a physical object in the game world, as opposed to the traditional floating arms and gun that doesn't have actual collision. However, The maps don't appear to have been designed with this physicality in mind, and so interior spaces feel way too small. Your gun is constantly being brought up to avoid hitting walls and other objects,, even with short rifles and pistols, which makes it very difficult to actually do CQB (not that the abysmal AI would allow for that) as the game randomly decides to point your gun towards the ceiling every time you peek a doorway. This was an issue in early RoN but its since been fixed and Tarkov has had this down for years, so there are no excuses here. Either the buildings and interiors need to be scaled up a bit, or your character needs to be able to pull their gun closer to themselves and still be able to point it forward, like in real life. The graphics are fine, nothing stunning, but vary pretty far based on the map. Dense foliage and sunlight look fine, but the urban/less natural environments look like cheap Unity store assets, and the lighting can look terrible in places. Like the AI, this is after a big graphics overhaul, so not a lot of hope for the future. The maps themselves are fine and surprisingly big, although some are kind of randomly sprawling mazes without real design like Depot. They might even feel good to play if there was actually AI in the game instead of practically static models with guns. The sound is lackluster all around. guns sound okay, but there seems to only be one set of sound affects for each calibre. All 5.56 rifles sound the exact same, all 9mms sound the same, etc. Considering You'll pretty much only use 5.56 rifles, this gets pretty repetitive, and isn't necessarily realistic either. Also I'm pretty sure 5.56 and 5.45 weapons use the same sound files, which definitely isn't realistic. The 5.56 sounds fine, but the 7.62 effects are pretty weak. I already mentioned the very small number of AI voicelines, which don't indicate any kind of behaviour and are often just repeated over and over, which is probably a bug that has gone unfixed for years. The only redeeming quality of the entire game, and what I'm pretty sure 99% of the playerbase plays for, is the character and weapon customisation. The ability to choose what pouches and equipment go on your plate carrier/chest rig and belt is pretty cool, and that along with the nearly unrestricted use of railspace on guns is not only novel, but significantly more realistic than other tactical shooters like RoN, Tarkov, and Arma. My only complaint is not being able to place canted red dot mounts under larger scopes like you can in real life. The models aren't even touching, but you get an 'attachments are overlapping' message, and you then have to make the canted sight either way too close or too far from your face. Look, I understand there is a very small dev team behind this game, but it was first conceptualised in 2007, and began development in earnest sometime between 2012-2016. Being as generous as possible, that's almost decade of development. That's ridiculous for three undercooked modes, a handful of maps, and the worst AI I've ever played against. . Other indie titles like RoN and Six Days in Fallujah have done far more than Ground Branch has in a fraction of the time. Project Wingman, a far more ambitious project (albeit in a completely different genre), started development in 2015-2017 and had a polished released in 2020, and that game is not only in a different realm of quality, but it had just one developer, so the excuse of GB's dev team being small doesn't hold up, not after a decade. Updates release at a snails pace, if at all, and hardly change anything. Sure, RoN was janky as hell in the alpha and beta, I was there, but it was constantly changing and improving. GB is not. This game has no future, and that 1.0 release is never coming. There's a poor mod on the GB reddit that's desperately trying to defend this game by shit talking RoN and other games, as if those don't make this (alleged) scam game look like Steam new release shovelware. Go play Ready Or Not.

8 years and still in Early Access and is still the same as when I played it 8 years ago.

The game is so close to being good, but the AI ruins it. The difficulty (AI experience level) is scaled via aimbot. On easier-medium difficulties, the AI will be delayed in their reactions to you and miss multiple shots at times. On higher difficulties, they will laser you as soon as you turn a corner or, in some cases, through walls. There is no change in behavior otherwise. They don't take cover, they don't flank, nothing. Everything else about this game is awesome, especially with friends, but the AI makes it hard to enjoy thoroughly, especially given the price.