I think it's about time I lay out my own review, to me what feels like a final nail to the coffin of the game.
This game is effectively dead. No matter what the discord, devs, or regular players (including myself tell you), it's done.
The last major update was the Retribution update, and even that barely helped the numbers. It peaked for about another hundred extra players, and on a game that relies entirely on people being online to play (no offline alternative), this was a very slim hope. Alas, it lasted very short, and you can see the hard peak and hard drop on any player chart if you view by lifetime. As of this current review, there are approximately 10-30 total players active each month. Those are miserable numbers, and sometimes you can't even get a match as the player count is not high enough. Most players have migrated to the most popular region selection just to get a match.
I loved, and still do love Marauders, but it has fallen far from grace. What happened to the game is miserable, and there's a lot of blame to go around.
Team17 has zero interest in the game, does not list much information about it and tries to dodge most, if not all association with the game. Last major T17 sale did NOT include Marauders.
SIG are back and forth about "well we might have an update, but we can't tell you anything" which is corporate speak for "we're not telling you a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ thing". You can't falsify hope sadly, it only works for so long. It was rode on for Retribution, and fair enough, it DID come eventually, but like I said, it was short, it was sad, and it helped very little.
The general playerbase is exhausted with the game, and a recent incident that moved SIG to ban half of the active playerbase was an absolute buffoonery move. Their claim for this ban was 'streamsniping', but SS has been a infinitely long issue with the game that has NEVER been addressed or properly dealt with. There are little to no options to actually prevent sniping, and their response to deal with this is just ban the players and ANYONE ASSOCIATED WITH THEM in a fell sweep. This was even challenged publicly multiple times but got goofy responses in turn, including one that seemed to signal that SIG has a partial lack of ability to issue bans themselves and instead have to issue requests to T17. (Why do the developers of the game not have access to banning options???)
I have loved, breathed, and lived marauders for almost 850 hours. I put all my effort into playing the game very often, bought easily 10-15 copies for friends, recommended it to everyone I could, made videos on it, playing daily even, I have seen the best and the worst of the game, but the direction for the game has slowly dwindled to a whimpering death, and nobody is saving it this time. I cannot with good faith and honesty recommend it any longer.
I would hope in future with the Stop Killing Games movement and some other things that there's a thumb taken out the ass of whoever is at the top of this ladder and they add a very healthy, likely very welcomed PvE mode. Or just shut the game down all-together. I don't think it really matters at this point.
But we can only hope.
For now? Ta ta, adios Marauders. You were a blessed one. Maybe one day we can blast into space again. Maybe not. Maybe in 70 years.
