An SSD is mandatory for this game, attempting to run it installed on an HDD causes seriously bloated load times and performance issues as the game loads assets on the fly (the most immediate issue being the intro cinematic to the campaign stuttering, crashing and desyncing audio when attempting to load while playing it, even with an SSD it still stutters and freezes unless you pause it and wait a minute).

Other than the requirement of being installed on an SSD performance is surprisingly good once you get into the game however when attempting to play with the heavily promoed coop and operations game mode you quickly run into serious bugs that hamper this, the worst being the "thunderhawk bug" where entering the operation start area causes you to be dumped back on to the battlebarge with most assets unloaded and no menus working, while I figured out how to solve this it isn't obvious and is a massive frustration for players.

The tutorial is also incredibly lacking and does a horrendous job of teaching you the core mechanics of the game which can lead to immense frustration, only the operations trials which are practically hidden unless you know where to look give you a proper practice tool to familiarize with the games core mechanics.

While this is in many ways is an incredible game it runs up tot he simple fact that this is a heavily marketed AAA product with a colossal budget and big corporations behind it and releasing a heavily unpolished and outright incomplete product like this for 70 USD (100 NZD for me) is frankly appalling.

An SSD is mandatory for this game, attempting to run it installed on an HDD causes seriously bloated load times and performance issues as the game loads assets on the fly (the most immediate issue being the intro cinematic to the campaign stuttering, crashing and desyncing audio when attempting to load while playing it, even with an SSD it still stutters and freezes unless you pause it and wait a minute). Other than the requirement of being installed on an SSD performance is surprisingly good once you get into the game however when attempting to play with the heavily promoed coop and operations game mode you quickly run into serious bugs that hamper this, the worst being the "thunderhawk bug" where entering the operation start area causes you to be dumped back on to the battlebarge with most assets unloaded and no menus working, while I figured out how to solve this it isn't obvious and is a massive frustration for players. The tutorial is also incredibly lacking and does a horrendous job of teaching you the core mechanics of the game which can lead to immense frustration, only the operations trials which are practically hidden unless you know where to look give you a proper practice tool to familiarize with the games core mechanics. While this is in many ways is an incredible game it runs up tot he simple fact that this is a heavily marketed AAA product with a colossal budget and big corporations behind it and releasing a heavily unpolished and outright incomplete product like this for 70 USD (100 NZD for me) is frankly appalling.