Burkina Faso Insurgency is a neat game. Junko, that being the developer, made a call of duty zombies styled game called secu, and has started to take on the tactical genre. So immediately, his talent for making dramatic looking shooter maps and places shines through again, the lighting and visuals especially stand out, looking about like an early xbox one game from 2015, and he's gone on to make a storyline with an end objective and some actual voice acting.
Big improvement from secu, where you kind just walked in a straight line and killed everything in between without much else aside from a boss or something to spend in game money on in safehouses and that was basically the game.
There's a few more locations, as well as some customization and a squad who can come with you. Usually I just take the squad with me since there's seemingly no reason not to other than a challenge. But you do have difficulty settings so you could likely just use them if you felt like it. You also have multiple entry points, not to dissimilar to something like rainbow six siege and that's cool. Helps with replay value as well.
However the biggest issue throughout this game is that it runs absolutely horridly. I blue screened at least 5 times, and it slammed my computer and the fans to levels that clearly weren't right for what was being shown on the screen. Now my computer isn't the latest but it can likely run this game according to the requirements on the page. I have a GTX Titan XP, an AMD FX8320, and 32GB of RAM. It's not the latest, but it's pretty good.
Mostly what kills performance is the use of Temporal Anti-Aliasing, as well as overlapping lights, and high resolution textures, which could be reduced, or otherwise lowered in resolution with minimal, if any noticeable difference. Mostly what I could tell was Junko is using 2k and 4k textures on the models, with 2k and 4k detail and normal maps on top of each other leading to diminishing returns and lag. Lowering them to something like 1024 using unreal 4.26's built in compression settings would look almost identical on most models and give a decent bump to the frame rate, although you'd have to do it by hand and make sure nothing looked too blurry. FXAA would also be a decent alternative that would remove the matrix ghosting issues tons of games on unreal 4 and 5 can have, while blurring the image slightly and reducing aliasing artifacts and improving performance.
As well as this, a few missions were incomplete and all of them were laggy, one in particular was where the game hard locked and I couldn't progress as my game had been corrupted. That being a mission where I was to hunt down one of the isis leaders in a 3 story building that was in a city, but nothing happened. Then after running around for about an hour, I noticed in the top left of my hud that there was a bit of very hard to read text saying the mission had soft completed, and I should press a button to continue. After doing so, the game broke and refused to boot up again. Leading to me quitting. So unfortunately, I wasn't able to beat the game, nor did I feel like replaying about 3 hours to get back to the mission and hope it wouldn't break again.
The game is still in early access but that is worth considering. Sounds like he's got his work cut out for him. But there's been some good improvements even in the short time I played this and talked with Junko, and I'll probably come back to play in a few months or whenever when more updates inevitably are released. I'm glad you've made some more progress on your projects and wish you the best with Burkina Faso. You've come a long way from your days making maps for zombie games, and I'm really proud of you.
You've made a good game, and either way, I'm looking forward to playing it more when development gets further along and the game becomes more finished and fixed. As for now, I'll be busy with other things. Thanks for reading my review.
