After spending well over 100 hours playing Firefight and completing both the Eastern and Western Front campaigns, I think I've played enough to give a fair and informed review.
I want to start with the positives because the game does deserve credit for them. Firefight offers a huge amount of content like dozens of maps, a large variety of units, an active Discord community and plenty of mods created by players. On paper, it looks like an excellent RTS with almost endless replayability.
Unfortunately, once you actually spend a lot of time with it, you start noticing that many of its most basic mechanics simply don't work as well as they should. For a game that costs around €20 and has been in development for years, that's incredibly disappointing.
The biggest problem by far is the AI.
The infantry AI is honestly some of the worst I've experienced in a strategy game. It constantly ignores orders. You can carefully tell a squad to move through gardens, between buildings or behind cover, and several soldiers will randomly decide to run across the main road instead, straight into enemy machine guns or tanks. When those soldiers die, it doesn't feel like I made a tactical mistake,but it feels like the AI decided not to listen.
Shooting is equally frustrating. I understand that soldiers miss shots, especially under fire, but elite troops shouldn't look like they've never held a rifle before. Units regularly miss easy targets at close range, fail to correct their aim and sometimes don't even notice enemies standing in obvious positions. I've had attacks where I completely outnumbered the defenders, had the better position and the element of surprise, yet the battle became a complete mess simply because my own troops couldn't hit anything.
Suppression is another mechanic taken to an extreme. Sometimes soldiers stay pinned to the ground for what feels like forever, completely ignoring movement orders even when remaining there is guaranteed to get them killed. To not mention how that supression worsens when AI's artillery is suspciciously overly accurate compared to yours.
Anti-tank infantry behaves just as strangely. Instead of prioritising their bazookas or anti-tank launchers against an approaching tank, they'll sometimes choose to fire their rifles first. Watching a soldier equipped with a bazooka shoot rifle rounds at a tank while the entire squad is about to be overrun is both ridiculous and infuriating.
Then there are the tanks.
I completely understand that tanks have limited visibility and that's why even irl they rely on infantry support. That's realistic. The problem is that Firefight pushes this limitation to absurd levels. Tanks sometimes fail to spot another tank sitting in the middle of an empty road or an open field until it's already too late. There are moments where your gun is literally pointing towards the enemy, yet your crew somehow needs another three seconds to realise that a huge armoured vehicle is directly in front of them. By the time they finally react, they're already destroyed.
Flanking should be the obvious solution, right? Unfortunately, not always. Even when you successfully sneak around through forests or behind buildings, the enemy often detects you first despite not even facing your direction. It makes successful manoeuvres feel more dependent on luck than on good tactics.
Driving tanks is another headache. Their greatest enemy isn't another tank, it's bushes and small obstacles. Instead of crushing through vegetation like a vehicle weighing dozens of tonnes should, tanks constantly stop, reverse, turn around multiple times or take bizarre routes just to cross a small garden or tree line. It's frustrating to watch and often gets vehicles killed for reasons that have nothing to do with you.
Speaking of vegetation, bushes and trees are handled poorly as well. Instead of acting as concealment, they often behave like solid walls that completely block vision. This makes ambushes far less effective than they should be because you usually have to expose your own units before they can even see the enemy. More often than not, the defending AI spots you first anyway.
This leads to another major issue, the AI almost always feels like it has an unfair advantage when defending. I understand that defenders should have an advantage, its realistic when you know how warfare works, but there are countless situations where you've done everything correctly, gained the tactical advantage and still get punished because the AI reacts faster or simply ignores the same limitations imposed on the player.
The campaign is another huge disappointment. There are many maps, but every map contains several missions played on exactly the same battlefield. The only things that change are your starting position, the enemy deployment and the level of opposition. Each mission usually lasts between 30 and 45 minutes, meaning you'll often spend five or six hours on the exact same map before finally moving on. After dozens of hours, the game starts feeling repetitive instead of exciting.
The custom battle mode is also far more limited than it first appears. You can choose the map, country, weather and build your own army choosing the amount points, but you can't properly configure the enemy army in the same way. Instead of creating truly unique scenarios, it often ends up feeling like you're just replaying another campaign mission.
What disappoints me the most is seeing the developer continues adding new content while so many fundamental mechanics still need polishing. The game doesn't need more units or more maps nearly as much as it needs a smarter AI and improvements to its core gameplay. Suggestions posted on the Discord server rarely seem to lead to meaningful changes, even when they would improve both realism and gameplay.
I fully understand that Firefight is largely the work of a single developer, and I genuinely respect the amount of effort that has gone into creating it. But as a customer, I also have to judge the final product. After more than 100 hours, I don't feel like I'm playing a finished RTS. I feel like I'm playing a game with fantastic ideas that still struggles with some of the most fundamental aspects of the genre.
The worst part is that Firefight can actually be incredibly fun. There were moments where I genuinely enjoyed planning assaults, defending villages or coordinating tanks and infantry together. That's exactly why this is so frustrating. The game has so much potential, yet so many battles end with me fighting the AI controlling my own troops instead of fighting the enemy.
In the end, I simply can't recommend buying it at its current price or state. There is a good game hidden underneath all these problems, but after more than 100 hours and countless moments of unnecessary frustration, I honestly believe there are better RTS games that deserve your money.
