GROUND BRANCH Reviews

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

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

Ground Branch is Tacticool Barbie. I've had a great time using it as secondary media for music, podcasts, and news I want to listen to. I just customize the gear, run the bare-bones missions, and repeat until I'm done with the album or whatever. But for Solo/Coop PvE that's really all this game is good for. The mission types, AI, and general content pool is stale and poorly executed. Mods can address some weak spots, gear especially, but they don't fix the core issues with gameplay. Ground Branch is worth checking out on sale, but at its standard price it's just not worth the time. Hopefully with some further development this will be worthy of its price tag, but seeing the state of development its in since being dropped in 2018, I can't say I'm confident in that ever happening. AI AND NPC ENCOUNTER EXPERIENCE QUALITY The AI is very bad (with occasional moments of x-ray vision) making it difficult to have an engaging or challenging experience. They lack almost all capacity for thoughtful and organised movement or strategy, so they kinda just wander around and swarm at threats. And as far as aim goes, its almost like they roll dice per shot but the odds are terrible, so they usually miss, but they still can instantaneously dome you in every now and then. Pretty much all other aspects of engaging with the NPCs are similarly low quality: They bunch up in really bizarre ways, the voice acting, animations, and customization options are all bad, and then there is the sound... NPCs move almost silently yet scream constantly, but those screams have a questionable relationship with distance and surfaces. So when one NPC screams from the other side of a wall 100 meters away it sounds like they are right on top of you. PVP PvP is engaging but with such a small community you have some obvious drawbacks there. CONTROL & GENERAL GAMEPLAY The control isn't as polished as I'd like but there is a unique appeal to the much more stable aiming and slower mechanics. This is super noticeable when active aiming, there's almost no sway and limited interference from breathing. Compared to current milsim-esque games the point shooting feels a little arcadey, but thats the appeal. Its giving CS:GO vibes when you use a laser, so you still need to mind your aim, but it feels crisp and responsive. My only issues are there is the lack of cool content to use it with and the animation/visual feedback from weapons is still a little rough. As far as encounter creation goes, the mission sets are so limited that I recommend making liberal use of the steam workshop to give yourself a little more variety. But even with that added variety, the limited map selection and bad NPC performance can make it feel more fun to play dress up than run missions on some days. GEAR Gear is where its at really, the customization here- *especially* with mods is pretty impressive, it is tacticool Barbie after all. *But* the bulk of my kits are some kind of modded content, its just better done and often times more thoughtfully implemented than some of the base gear. And beyond Ammo, a couple explosives, and your guns there isn't much else to carry. So it feels like this impressive and flexible customization is wasted on the lack of things like a water bladder, an IFAK, different packs, shears, tq, etc. So even as a tacticool barbie dress up sim, this feels lacking a little. The guns are sick but mods also feel required to put any time into the customization. So with a healthy sweep through the steam workshop, setting up guns will feel pretty great (maybe you see a theme developing with this review) RELIANCE ON MODDING Had this game dropped with day one modding support there would be a significantly more robust community, but instead they waited until 2024 to add it... 6 years after release... So rather than having a symbiotic relationship between indie dev and community, we are left with a "Too little, too late" situation: A small slice of a tiny community desperately trying to keep the game alive with whatever content they can add. Mods are the only pulse you can give this game at this point, which is a bittersweet experience, since even with every mod on nexus/steam workshop, this game still feels like a mess. CONCLUSION So in all ways this is just a bit too unfinished to suggest to anyone this late into its development at its current full price. Especially since a good experience is so heavily reliant on a fairly limited modding community. With some 'Ready or Not' style map design and AI (including teammate NPCs as well) this could be a lot more complete of a package, but as it stands this is a $10-$15 experience at best. Ground Branch is messy, and sure, with a more active modding community (and more importantly way more funding for the actual development) this thing could finally pop off... But lets be real, that's not happening. Buy it on sale, get a bunch of mods, have fun playing tacticool barbie with your soldier and guns, run it with some music, coop, or pvp if you can, it'll be fun.

Game is awesome for being in Beta, mods are legit and the need for real life tactics makes this game excellent practice mentally.

Ground Branch is only 50% of a game, and let me say right off the bat, the 50% that IS there, IS very good. The gun customisation is some of the best I've ever seen. The pacing of the gameplay is also nice and slow, really letting you be tactical... but the missing other half of the game quickly becomes apparent. For a game that is PvE orientated, its AI is near brain-dead. The bots do not take cover. They do not flank. They just stand around, then walk in a straight line towards you. So, you turn up the difficulty to increase the challenge, but the only difference is that now the brain-dead bots have aimbot. To make matters worse, you are always a 2-shot kill. It doesn't matter if you get shot in the toe, the next bullet is 100% going to put you in spectator mode. The modding community is keeping the game on life support, but the game flatly refuses this intervention, because there is no mod support. If you want to play a game with your friends using mods, the stars have to align. Chances are 90% that the mods will only be available for the host, even if all players have them downloaded. I really wish the devs would finish the game, or at the very least, improve the AI and mod compatibility, but after 7 years in early access, I don't see it happening.

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.

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.

I discovered this game largely by accident, but it was one of the best purchases I’ve made in my 15 years on Steam. I grew up on games like the original Rainbow Six in the late 90’s, and they sparked a love for tactical shooters that has stayed with me ever since. The trouble in the past decade has been finding games that “scratch the itch” like the classics did. Sure, some Triple A titles came close, but they lacked attention to detail, and left me wanting more. The dev team behind Ground Branch is clearly dedicated to making this game better, listening to the community, and pouring their heart and soul into this title. They’re a smaller team, so updates can feel far apart, but honestly - it’s better that way. I’d much rather let a developer cook for a longer period of time if it means the end result is going to be worth the wait, and bring true quality to the game (unlike the approach so many other big studio names take these days). Bravo, BlackFoot Studios - don’t give up on this one, you have a loving and dedicated community who wants to see this game flourish.

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.