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Farlight 84 - Literal Soft Aim Bot on a Battle Royale

5K View2023-03-27

Since the announcement made by EA back in January, I've been trying to cope with the fact that the game will be forever gone. I still remember all the fun I had since the beta up until the end of Season 3, and all the good things about Apex Legends Mobile that I can't find the same feel in other mobile shooters; the movement and gunplay, memorable characters with interesting backstories that I actually interested in, and that super crunchy sound of shattered EVO Shield when you hit your shots.. That's probably one of my favorite parts of the game.

The Soft Launch was shockingly buttery smooth, but things start changing right after the Global releas. They somehow managed to make the game worse every each update, instead of making it smoother and more optimized. And after finding out that he game will cease its entire operation later on May 1st this year, I started to lose my will to play the game entirely. And all of my friends just stopped playing, and that made me even less motivated.

I still play Apex on my PC in my free time, but I still miss the overall experience of it on my crappy phone. So, I started scouting the internet hoping to find something that might be an alternative to Apex. And then I remember this new battle royale game I saw last year, it was Farlight 84.

Farlight 84 didn't peaked my interest that much back then, maybe because the massive hype of Apex Mobile global release and all the news about Warzone Mobile development back then. I'm quite interested after watching some gameplay on YouTube and TapTap, so I thought I'd like to give it a try. Take note that his is not an in-depth review, but merely my own view on the game based on my own experience playing it.

I'll be talking the basics like; core gameplay and basic mechanics, list of things I like and I don't, etc. Just things that I'd like to point out to basically give a general picture of the game to anyone who's considering to try the game.

CORE GAMEPLAY

It basically has all the essence of a Battle Royale game.. 60 players dropping in hot as squads, shoot each other for survival and good loots, be the last one standing and win the game. But Farlight 84 has a couple of its own little twist to spice things up. It's also a hero shooter, so you can use different skills to utilize in combat creatively. And.. everyone gets a Jetpack! You can boost yourself up in the air to get over buildings and terrains, you can thrust your rockets sideways to any directions strategically to dodge enemy bullets, or to confuse your enemies.

Your characters are called Capsulers. Instead of an air ship or battle bus, your characters will drop off their Capsule pod. Each Capsulers has their own skills uniquely their own and a class-based tactical that ranging from scanner, explosives, smoke grenades, etc.

As the game progress, each surviving players will be given Survival Bonus at the end of each round. This Survival Bonus and XPs you gain during the game will eventually level up your character, basically an upgrade that stays during the entirety of the match. Each levels will grant you some useful perks, such as; movement speed boost, extra max HP gain, and skill cooldown time reduce.

WEAPONS, LOOT POOLS & VEHICLES

Ground loot weapons and armors with different qualities are color-coded depending on its tier, and of course, better quality items will have better stats. As you deal damages to your enemies and surviving each round, your gears will eventually evolved into higher tiers with better stats over time.

There aren't that much variety of loot items in this game so it makes it easier to remember and understand, but that goes the same as their weapon loot pool too. The variety of weapons in this game are quite lacking in my opinion. There's only 1 or 2 types pf shotgun in this game if I remember it correctly.. There are no things like grenades or any throwables, and there's only 1 type of item for each base health and armor fix.

This game also has a pretty wide variety of vehicles. To be honest, they looked cool, but their existence are more less just for gimmicks. Vehicle controls feels horrible in this game, and the lack of HUD customization makes it even more stressful to use. Some speedy vehicles like their hoverbikes and cars aren't even that reliable and fast enough for map rotation. And their other armored vehicles that has guns and launchers doesn't even have any significant advantages in actual gun fights. I'd rather fight and roam on foot.

AVAILABLE GAME MODES

At the time, there's only 1 mode of battle royale available in the game right now, and it's only available in Squad of 4 players with only 2 playable BR map. There's no trios, duos, or even solo mode. And to make things even less exciting for me is the fact that the game only has third person mode. There are other game modes are also presents here. There are permanent game modes such as; Team Deathmatch, Hunt, and Treasure War. And there are also a couple of limited time modes on weekly rotation. Hunt and Treasure War is probably my favorite mode it currently has right now, I find it much more fun than the actual main battle royale game.

And... The Training Ground.. One of the things I dislike the most about this game. The Training Grounds lobby is shared between multiple players, and I can't even use the firing range with getting shot at or my vehicles blew up. It doesn't deal any damage, but since the game has hit flinch mechanic, every hit I get will screw up my aim. These randoms would just shot anyone around instead of the actual firing range targets. Dude, I just want to try out every guns and characters.

And to make it worse, other players that arein the same lobby as me are able to deal damage to any vehicles in the training ground. Getting in a vehicle in training ground without it getting blown out for the first 10 seconds, is already more challenging than the actual gunfight in its battle royale.

CUSTOMIZATIONS

From the Cosmetic side of customization, there are the usual ones that any of you would probably vcan guess already. Character skins, weapon skins, dive trails, nothing that different to other shooter games, maybe except skins for the jetpacks. In term of skills and ultimates, they're bound to their respective Capsulers, so you need to swap your characters to be able to use the skills you want to use for the match.

From what I understand is that the game is currently still under development, but wow, their HUD controls and other customizable settings are extremely lacking. Not every single elements of the HUDs aren't even there to customize, surprisingly some of the important ones especially echo HUD controls. The camera, aim sensitivity and gyro settings are all over the place but still lacking. But language options are surprising wide from in-game language to voice over.

OPTIMIZATIONS

Honestly, I was shocked when I found out that this game only took 665 MB of space on my phone. I don't even think it's possible nowadays to have a battle royale game with less than 1 GB, considering the graphics and contents that currently available in the game right now.

I'm not a game expert but somehow despite its small size, weirdly the game is battery taxing and slow to load at start. Even with an air-conditioned room, my phone still gets significantly warmer by just being AFK in the game lobby alone. I'm running the game in medium to high graphics with 60 fps settings and it runs smoothly in some cases, but it still has random lag spikes for no reason.

It's understandable to have lags during intense gun fight or whenever there are many players presents at the same time in a certain render distance, but the lag spikes happens too often even when there's literally nothing happening.

IN-GAME STORE

You can buy battle pass, individual cosmetics and loot boxes from their in-game store, you know, just like every other free to play games nowadays. And I think it's worth that the game also would give you a free first draw on any rate up banner events. The game has 2 different currencies, the one that you get by playing and the premium one, characters and some skins are also available to purchase with the free coins you get just by playing the game. The free battle pass also provides a pretty decent amount rewards too, pretty good for F2P players in my opinion.

THE "NOT SO GOOD" PARTS

Before getting into my conclusion, I'd like to mention this one out because it's so horrible it's almost ironically laughable in my opinion.. The aim assist is comically insane. It's probably the strongest one and the most inconsistent I've ever experienced in any mobile shooter games.

It's so broken yet so inconsistent, I'm literally battling against it everytime I try to shoot. Sometimes your character would just literally strafes following your enemies, but sometimes it would just won't work at the same time. I think the horrible sensitivity settings is the one to blame for its inconsistency. It snaps right onto enemies like literally soft aimbot when it does work, but would screw you badly when it doesn't.

Not just that, some movements are just awkward and inconsistent too, especially when you're running into obstacles and needed to jump over it. And.. to make things worse for me, for some reason the game has no hold-to-ADS option. That's a huge turn down in my book.

LAST VERDICT

On paper, this game might be a good one to try out. The graphics are nice, it has a couple of little twist and different takes to the overly saturated battle royale genre, it doesn't take a lot of space, it runs reasonably decent on mid to low-end devices, and when games nowadays are getting more realistic nowadays, its Fornite-esque cartoonish graphic style is a kind of refreshing too. But after playing it for a while I find it very hard for me to like the game and continue playing it.

It still has super janky and inconsistent controls, random lag spikes that a bit too often to appear, the lack of controls and sensitivity settings, the super annoyingly inconvenient firing range, and the comically broken aim assist... It's really hard for me to give it another try for now. Well, the game is technically still in development, maybe they will patch things up a couple of fixes and better balancing. The game still has the potentials in the future if they did it right, and maybe I'd like to give it another try one day. (And if they're willing to tone down the aim assist a little bit 💀).

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