First thing's first: connecting to the game. As you can see in the video above, there are obvious connection difficulties. Because of the nature of mobile development, however, we aren't able to determine whether the problem is with the application or the netcode. But we have issues with logging in on our OnePlus 6T test device. The good thing is that we did get in eventually and we thought managed to find a reliable workaround for dealing with the issue. We were wrong. And before you mention it, we're fully updated, rebooted the device, tried on WiFi, and still dealing with this problem. This happens to us literally every day. This definitely needs a fix.
The thing is, however, that doesn't make up for the very obvious app launch issues. Once we were in, though, we were introduced to a wealth of high graphical fidelity and stunning audio. Even on mobile, this game sounds amazing. We could hear every little detail, down to the sweet mechanical sounds of a full reload. The horns blare with amazing clarity, the percussion quickens the pulse, and the highs are pristine. It doesn't end there either, much like Cyber Hunter, there are a host of settings. They didn't miss a single thing. This team learned a lot from the new kid on the block. We joined the match above in the last two rounds and had a surprisingly good time. We had a good partner to run with and we took care of each other quite well - even without the use of a mic. The community is generally not toxic. In fact, most of the mobile players are pretty quiet whenever we play. Naturally, there are some selfish players and some who aren't very good, but the experience when gaming with others in CoD Mobile is relatively pleasant. Relatively. More on that later. Gameplay was initially pretty good overall. The controls were fully customizable and responsive, sensitivity could be tweaked, and the default layout was wonderful. We moved ours around to suit our Yobwin Mobile Gaming Controller. It was great. At first. We'll touch on that soon. Moving on, we didn't even need to use the fan on our controller for quite some time. It wasn't until we noticed our fingers sticking to the screen that we even notice the device had finally gotten hot. That was about an hour into our gaming session. With our settings, the game was generally responsive and we didn't notice any frame drops or hanging. There was no dropped audio and it was surprisingly good on power consumption. When it was good, it was good, and we had a blast. The skill based matchmaking even worked well...at first.
We were relentless and that made us feel powerful. Just look at that score! Our first five head to head matches functioned perfectly. That's it. Just five. And though we won since then, it wasn't without a very significant amount of deep frustration in so doing. One of the key issues was the decision to go with much shorter matches. That probably wasn't the best move with the plethora of other issues with the game. When a player catches someone not playing fair and looks to get some revenge, the match ends on them. That feels terrible because they just have to eat that loss and decide whether or not to report the cheating player(s). We destroyed our kill / death ratio purely for the sake of documenting issues in competitive play. And there were a LOT of them. Some of these problems had gotten so bad that we sometimes struggled to figure out whether other players were cheating or the game was just not quite up to snuff. It's often more fun to just play against the bots. Absolutely no problems there.
No, really. It's that bad. There were ways to use controllers with the game before controller support was officially added. This is accomplished by installing a modded version of the game. Yes, people still do this in 2019. By acquiring one of these hacked versions of the game, players can connect their modded controllers, lag switch and all. Sometimes it was obvious, like the time we died due to the other player literally dragging us back with their crosshair to our previous position just so they could easily shoot us down, the slow motion kills, the invincible players, or the teleporters. But there were lots of times when it wasn't so cut and dry, like when the software would misread our connection speed and quality during the match. Even when using Game Mode, both built in and installed apps, the problems didn't go away or even lessen in impact. There is no solution for this. Other issues that are hard to spot are auto fire bots because so many people pre-fire. Furthermore, to burn so much ammunition usually means the player has an infinite ammo hack and / or a wall hack. The way players engage, however, makes it hard to make this determination. But we still had some extremely questionable experiences. More, there were still lots of boosters, people playing on teams in Free For All, and rage quitters [though we can't really blame them]. If that isn't infuriating enough, there were players stacking their cheats. There were head glitchers camping with sniper rifles in the farthest reaches of the map, using aim bots, and using lag switches at the same time! That's just unreasonable. We had to ask ourselves how these people saw this as fun. Thankfully there's a report feature in this game, but they won't get back to reporting players on the status of the report and offending players due to "security reasons." So, all of us who were cheated will never know if the culprits we report are ever disciplined for cheating and violating the terms of service we all have to agree to in order to play the game. Finally, another serious issue we frequently come across in the game is definitely a software problem. That would be spontaneously locking controls. The character we have would just freeze in place and only look around, unable to aim or shoot. We wanted to blame this on cheaters but quickly learned in Zombies that wasn't the case at all. This happens in all game modes, including training. That's terrible and needs to be fixed expeditiously. So, we conclude with this: CoD Mobile is a beautiful game with loads of potential. Don't play it. Yet. Be on the lookout for our follow-up review when these issues are addressed. As long time CoD fans, we definitely want to give this title another shot at glory. Our rating: 5/10What are your thoughts and experiences? Please share them with us in the comments section down below. Thank you for taking this ride with us and please don't forget to follow us on InstaGram, subscribe to our YouTube channel, like and comment on all of our videos, share with everyone you know, and meet us here next time.
Our channel is going to be loaded with video evidence and a number of players are unfortunately going to be exposed in the process. We apologize for this but bad sportsmanship is not okay. There are a host of issues, so, for now, avoid this game like the plague. Be looking out for the full review and video commentary in The Rundown this week.
Online PresenceWe're currently in the process of expanding our online footprint. As our readers, you'll be able to find us in several places online. In our review of Cyber Hunter and the Yobwin Mobile Game Controller, we included some gameplay in commentary over on our new YouTube channel. We're still working on our audio quality and upload limitations, so please bear with us during this process. Please don't forget to like, comment, share, and subscribe. Also, if you use the service, you can find us on InstaGram, where we post wisdom quotes, screenshots of our floor plans, and some gameplay highlights. We game daily and you, our members to be, will be able to connect with us and play as thanks for your generous contributions. We truly appreciate your support so, once we have the membership feature of the site launched, we'll be granting you more access to us online, providing the names of other services we've started using and how to connect with us there. These are direct connections to us, so it's something reserved exclusively for our members. Finally, you may notice ads on the site in our bid for funding so that we can keep the business alive. We'll do our best to make sure these ads are minimally invasive. More, we do not and cannot collect your data. The cookie opt out is being presented according to law. If you opt out, know that your ad experience won't be curated according to your online behavior. Please lend us more of your support by not blocking these ads because we plan to turn them off immediately after we build a large enough community to sustain ourselves without them. Starting on that day, you'll instead see us endorsing products we like and that we believe you'll like too. We really don't want to be ad supported, so be on the lookout for our Patreon campaign. It's almost ready and coming sooner than later. Don't worry, we're keeping you in mind the entire way through. Bear in mind that we simply can't do this without you. We absolutely need your help with keeping the lights on, so remember to get the word out. Bring your friends, families, and teammates to join us on our journey. We truly believe in what we're doing and we're highly confident that we all, you included, can accomplish it together. Thank you so much for reading and supporting us. We'll see you again soon.
Update: May 3, 2020 Due to the unfair treatment of honest players, quality control issues, and more aggressive monetization measures put in place, we unfortunately no longer officially endorse this game. Though Cyber Hunter remains fun and even exhilarating at times, NetEase has a tendency to punish victims of cheating as well as the cheaters themselves. They have chosen to ignore all feedback regarding this matter, refusing to return lost stars, reverse unjust losses, and awarding the affected players with season rewards they missed due to this bad behavior. Furthermore, there are misstatements in tier descriptions that lead many players to believe that once a tier is achieved, they may meet the requirements in any game mode to earn the reward. When alerted to this issue numerous times, the company refused to make corrective changes or award affected players the items they missed while [fairly] interpreting the descriptions this way. We continue to play and publish Cyber Hunter material purely to serve our growing community. Thankfully we weren't too late to the party for this to be a relevant review. Let's have a little talk about the new craze, Cyber Hunter by NetEase Games that is not pay-to-win.
This game is being heralded as one that does battle royale right. We agree. We've never had so much fun playing a battle royale game - being doubters at first. Some of us used to play a good amount of Search & Destroy in Call of Duty and we had an okay time. It's not exactly battle royale but more players focused on those elements than the objectives. It was usually a small battle for survival. We eventually found our way to Fortnite and we appreciate its value to the industry, but we didn't really like it. There was more focus on decorations and shenanigans than on finishing the match, leaving a huge skill gap in the community. The few who spent more time actually playing to win rose to the top and became objects of ire for many of the more playful people beneath them. They became impossibly high obstacles. Don't get us wrong, we're not criticizing meme culture. We're only saying that we don't have dank memes, so we didn't really fit in with the Fortnite crowd. We felt left out more than anything. After all, it's easier to have a good time when you actually get the joke.
We've done a bit of testing just to be sure that the controls are reliable. We navigated the interface in its entirety and were careful to pay close attention while playing matches. They're very responsive, having visually immediate actions carried out whenever we touched a single thing. There's also very little latency when playing online. We only noticed a handful of dropped inputs while we were playing over the last four days, which means players should have no real difficulty getting into the swing of things. Animations are smooth and the camera doesn't swing widely in any situation. Instead of sliding off of obstacles, making some views very difficult, it makes those items translucent so you can simply see through them when they would otherwise block camera movement. Maintaining some realistic elements, if players are far enough back, the object would obstruct the view as one would expect in AAA titles. The map is stationary, however, so it will take a little getting used to. The minimap is expandable with just a touch and the enlarged view can be closed with a single tap as well. It can get in the way, so the goal isn't for you to run around with it open for very long. It's vital information but players can't expect to fight with it in the way. It does, however, allow for setting and clearing markers, and the drop-in has auto-navigation within range of the target. There's also a helpful auto-sprint feature for crossing large distances or fleeing persistent foes. Even better, when the storm closes in, it displays a handy dashed line to the new safe zone. This feature has become common because no one likes to get lost on a large map, forced to frequently check the expanded view when they need to be focusing on their surroundings. Furthermore, a white delta shows which direction the player is facing. Information is plentiful in a match. Gamers can rely on knowing the direction attacks are coming from. Much like Call of Duty, when a player is shot, a ring around the character shows which direction the shots are coming from. The map also lights up with helpful information, like footsteps and firing indicators. They don't give away the exact position, which is a welcome challenge, but they do provide the expected approximation so you can go hunt down the shooter. It's not easy, it's not impossible, it's just right. Check the video below for some of our gameplay. The audio is really good, even when not using HD sound settings. It's not quiet but it also doesn't blow your eardrums out, so you can comfortably play with or without earbuds. We recommend earbuds though. You'll get mic functionality and stereo sound. There are helpful animations that will provide information as to whether or not your mic is being picked up and talking indicators don't get in the way when you're playing. You just hear the others using mics. What we really appreciate are the audio settings. You'll be able to set your desired audio behavior quickly and easily up to the left of the map. There are two channels, the team channel and the all channel. Turn it on, mute it, or turn it off. It's the same with your own mic. And to sweeten the deal, they added something we greatly appreciate in the deep settings. Players can adjust their music, voice, and sound effects volumes. This is one of those things a person doesn't know they need until they have it; then they can't live without it.
We're just going to tell it like it is. We had a fantastic time playing this title and we fully intend to continue playing it. We think you will too. If you were considering picking this free-to-play title up, please do without hesitation. Our rating: 9/10Give your thoughts in the comments below. And if you're LFG, feel free to post up in our Discord server. Just mouse over the Members tab near the top of the page, and click on Discord. Leave your player ID and we just may join you. See you inside.
We believe technology is at its best when it can fade into the background, assisting you throughout your day whenever you need it. Wearable devices, like smartwatches and fitness trackers, do just that—you can easily see where your next meeting is with just a glance of an eye or monitor your daily activity right from your wrist.
Google aspires to create tools that help people enhance their knowledge, success, health and happiness. This goal is closely aligned with Fitbit’s long-time focus on wellness and helping people live healthier, more active lives.
We're honestly really excited for this news and hope that this move will help Google bring Wear OS to more devices in the future. What do you think? Leave your thoughts in the comments below. Thank you for reading, and be sure to come back for more gaming and tech news.
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