Crucible

Crucible was a short-lived third-person shooter video game developed by Relentless Studios and published by Amazon Game Studios. It was available on May 20, 2020 for mh:awesomegames:Microsoft Windows, after having been in development since 2014.

Why It Sucked

 * 1) The game lacked any meaningful form of communication (such as text and voice chat), aside from a ping feature that is barely noticeable. The fact that these features were missing in a team-based competitive shooter, was especially baffling, since these kinds of games rely on such features. This limitation could be circumvented by using external apps like Discord, though.
 * 2) Due to the aforementioned lack of communication, solo queuing could be an unpleasant experience, as you couldn't really tell what any of your teammates were doing or where they were.
 * 3) The game was poorly optimized, as many users had reported performance issues on rigs that either met or exceeded the minimum/recommended specs and could run games just as (if not more) demanding just fine.
 * 4) Hit detection system is very poor, most of the shots will not register. This problem were more apparent for melee champions who will struggle to even hit an enemy.
 * 5) There was only one map in the game, and it wasn't a very good one.
 * 6) The MOBA-inspired elements felt poorly-implemented. For example, enemy mobs were idiotic bullet sponges that barely served any other purpose than to provide EXP when killed and barely, if ever, fight back.
 * 7) The visuals looked like a late Xbox 360/early Xbox One game at best, making the poor optimization all the more baffling.
 * 8) The characters were poorly-balanced, with Captain Mendoza being cited as the most egregious example.
 * 9) The game was prone to having high latency issues (indicated by a red icon at the top-right corner of the screen), which could slow the framerate to a crawl.
 * 10) The sound design was lackluster, with poor weapon feedback making it hard to tell whether your shots were connecting or not.
 * 11) Atrocious loading times, with the game taking over 3 minutes to get into a match.
 * 12) There were a lot of players that couldn't even play the game at all, due to the fatal error timeout on login.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) The characters were well designed and stand out from each other, from humans like Mendoza and Shakirri, to aliens like Earl, Drakahl, Ajonah, and Tosca, to even a robot called Bugg.
 * 2) The concept was interesting and you can clearly tell that Amazon was trying something new using MOBAs and hero shooters as a foundation.
 * 3) Interesting world-building, as an audio log heard during the tutorial hints that something terrible happened in the titular planet some time ago.
 * 4) Decent voice acting.

Reception
Crucible has received mixed-to-negative reviews and currently has a review score of "mixed" on Steam reviews, a 56/100 aggregate reviewer score and a 4.2/10 user score on Metacritic.

The game went back into closed beta status on June 30, 2020 following negative critical reception. However, due to a persistent decline of the game's player base, the servers were shut down on October 10, 2020.

The game was ranked #10 on AngryJoe's "Top 10 WORST Games of 2020!" video.

Videos
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