Brilliant first person shooter.
Fast Paced, action packed, amazing character dialogues, everything is fairly balanced (Shotguns need a nerf - PLEASE).
Characters are full of... character??
Although the game still has a few bugs and errors that show up now and again, the game itself is very fun and I will happily spend more time and money in this game.

One thing I reccomend for the devs to look at is loadout card trading, as this could be a much appriciated feature.

Read below for suggestions
EDIT 10/4/2016:
As much as I still enjoy this game, there is one thing that bothers me: content.
As much as the current content is great, it would be nice to see it more frequently as it took nearly 6 months for a new character to be released. Maybe release a map making kit for the public as well? That would be awesome

Once upon a time, I got my FPS kicks primarily through Unreal Tournament and other arena FPS games. Then Unreal stopped being a thing, and I switched to the Call of Dutys and Battlefields; never could get into the Counterstrikes. And you know, I had fun and everything, but all those easy kills made me complacent. Then Dirty Bomb comes along kicks my teeth in. In the good way, of course. A proper return to form, with longer time to kills and purist FPS mechanics. You don’t know how much you miss something until it’s been taken away from you, and then one day, many years later, you get it back. I didn’t know it, but I actually needed Dirty Bomb.

So, what is Dirty Bomb? Dirty Bomb is Splash Damage’s latest team-based, run and gun shooter where small teams race to complete objectives. Dirty Bomb offers old school gameplay with an emphasis on mastering mechanics like movement, speed and mechanical skill, placing a rare premium on tracking and headshots, skillsets no longer really required in today’s glut of instant kill FPS games. These elements are then given a modern coat of paint, with real world analogs like M4 carbines in place of link rifles.

Matches occur on large, multi-tiered maps with multiple, sequential objectives. Brink-esque, light parkour elements offer additional mobility options for clever players to get into tricky spots or eek out moment to moment advantages over their foes. So far, so Splash Damage. Dirty Bomb also borrows from Team Fortress 2, with distinct classes catering to various playstyles and roles, all complementing one another. While execution mode takes many cues from Counterstrike, Dirty Bomb’s Brink-style game modes, objective and stopwatch, is where Dirty Bomb shines.

Players step into the shoes of mercenaries, pre-selected before a match, “customized” via a loadout card with up to three augments. Mercenaries are divided into light, medium and heavy mercs with light mercs being faster but less durable than their heavier counterparts. Additionally, each merc is assigned a speciality or role. Medics heal and revive. Support rifleman provide ammo and call in various forms of artillery. Engineers complete objectives faster and often rely on sneaky alternatives to direct combat. The usual suspects.

A quick note for those of you who have seen Angry Joe's criminally bad "review." While loadouts with three augments are more powerful than loadouts with fewer augments, these augments will rarely determine the outcome of individual firefights. Additionally, players can purchase any three augment loadout they want in bronze quality relatively cheaply, and higher quality loadouts ( silver, gold, cobalt ) only offer different colour palettes. Dirty Bomb is in no way pay to win.

While good ability usage can determine matches, all abilities are linked to sometimes long cooldown timers, and players will end up relying on their firearms, a lot. As earlier mentioned, due to longer time to kills, single burst kills are rare and firearm prowess becomes very important. Hipfire reigns, and with a very healthy 2.0x damage multiplier on headshots, Dirty Bomb emphasizes an almost duelist approach to combat with both combatants attempting to connect as many rounds as possible while juking and strafing out of incoming fire. Without vehicles and killstreaks getting in the way on top of excellent netcode, combat is returned to glorious infantry, el mano, el mano basics.

This represents Dirty Bomb’s greatest strength and also, it’s predominant weakness. Due to Splash Damage shirking modern design principles designed to minimize skill gap, Dirty Bomb is not a game most players will be able to simply drop into and expect reasonable results. However, with some player investment, Dirty Bomb opens up and offers dedicated players huge room to grow through challenging matches, with thrilling engagements, in ways its streamlined competition cannot.

Dirty Bomb, however, has many faults, but for players seeking Dirty Bomb’s frenetic gameplay, there aren’t many modern options. But let’s go through Dirty Bomb’s numerous issues:

The competitive scene is not healthy, and overall, Dirty Bomb likely doesn’t have what it takes to enter the mainstream. Part of the reason is that Dirty Bomb is difficult. Without proper matchmaking ensuring players get evenly matched against similarly skilled players, new and lesser skilled players are often subject to routine stomps.

The balance isn’t perfect; explosives are too effective, and while the various mercs are fairly well balanced, a handful do stand tall over their competition. The same goes for loadout augments; some augments are clearly better, making certain loadouts clearly better.

Outside of the game itself, the loadout system is terrible and in serious need of an overhaul. Furthermore, with skins randomly assigned to loadouts, even if a player is lucky enough to receive a great loadout card, they may not get the skin they want. Worse yet, with skins tied to loadouts, Splash Damage can’t even sell skins. This also leads to the odd situation where while unlocking a merc isn't particularly difficult ( about 19 - 26 hours ), getting the loadout you want as a gold or cobalt may as well be impossible.

The events are horribly organized with event loot offered at a pithy 0.3% drop rate. That’s right, a third of one percent. The idea is probably to force players to the cash shop, but due to the terrible loadout system and inability to trade inventory items, the cash shop feels horribly overpriced. Oh, and the new trinkets, being mostly invisible to other players, are overpriced ♥♥♥♥.

While some of this may seem like nitpicking, I believe this does indicate a longstanding, fundamental disconnect between either Splash Damage or Nexon and the real world. What I'm trying to say is that a lot of this is very stupid and nobody wins.

Lastly, we finally talk about Dirty Bomb’s aesthetic. Don’t know how this ended up last, but if you hadn’t noticed Dirty Bomb’s many similarities with it’s predecessor, Brink, the aesthetics are a definite giveaway. While Dirty Bomb’s version of near-future London is a bit less dark and gloomy, the mercs have a similar, distinctive style and swagger. Best of all, the mercs are hilariously chatty ( mount an emplaced machine gun, and your merc will yell, “pew pew pew!” ) with interesting backstories. Certain individuals may be discouraged by the slightly cartoony aesthetic, but personally, I celebrate almost any move away from generic, military realism.

So there you go; an exquisitely well crafted blend of old school mechanics and modern sensibilities. You can’t win all your fights, but Dirty Bomb does alright. In many ways, a Brink 2.0; if only everything else about Dirty Bomb was as well honed as it’s gameplay. If you're not entirely convinced yet, but want to sharpen your FPS skills or try something new, well, let the price tag speak for itself: Free.

Here are just a few reasons to give Dirty Bomb a go (other than it being free, of course):

Gameplay - Dirty Bomb holds a very interesting strategic aspect unlike many first person shooters: five varying ability styles consisting of Fire Support, Medic, Engineer, Assault, and Recon actions. This title holds similar characteristics to MOBAs in the sense that each featured character has their own unique statistics block and special abilities, with improved features depending on the rarity of the selected loadout. For instance, Proxy is generally a close-ranged shotgunner with proximity mines, a quickened interaction speed with given objectives, and an enhanced walking and sprinting speed; Skyhammer, on the other hand, throws ammunition packs which can be used by both the dispensing player and their teammates, and an air strike attack that can be used after each cooldown period. The controls in this title are similar to those of other first person shooters, with the addition of the Q key acting as the Ability button.

Game Modes - In the debut game mode, Execution, one side must plant and retain a bomb at one of several points of interest while the second team either prevents this occurrence or disarms the bomb; picture, if you will, the Counter-Strike game series while deliberating on this concept. This game mode consists of ten rounds, each lasting a maximum of three minutes. The attackers and defenders swap sides after the midpoint of six rounds in each game, and the winners are decided when one team accumulates the majority of wins within ten rounds or by earning seven victories before the opponents.
/// Objective Mode is relatable to Execution Mode in that the teams are split between attackers and defenders, but holds its own uniqueness, entailing completing multiple tasks within the given time of fifteen minutes. This mode requires a great amount of coordination with teammates, as every moment could alter the course of each game. This mode can be quite hectic yet enjoyable with the sequenced events.
/// Stopwatch Mode is unlocked after a given player level, and is comparative to Objective Mode in that the two teams are separated into attackers and defenders, swapping roles after fifteen minutes or the completion of the primary objective; this signifies that each game concludes after thirty minutes. If both teams reach the same amount of objectives within the given time of thirty minutes, the game goes into overtime mode to decide the victorious team. I find this mode to be very amusing, even with my own dislike for time-based competition.

TL:DR - I must admit that I had not experienced the same hacker problem as many of the other individuals that reviewed this game, though I will not omit that the problem may, indeed, exist in the community. Dirty Bomb’s community-as I have experienced-and relatable content is enough to entice the player to return to the arena. I recommend this title to those interested in class-drive first person shooters and skirmish-oriented matches. Thanks for reading.

Do you enjoy these reviews? Please visit my Curator Page at Spearpoint Reviews.

-Start Dirty Bomb
-Play medic
-Nader is down
-Run to revive Nader
-Nader martys
-cri
-Nader down again
-Run to Nader again
-Nader martys again
-cri again
-Muffled Allahu Akbar in the distance
-cri more

10/10 would let Nader Allahu Akbar on my face again

So after 360 odd hours on this game I'm ready to give my honest opinion on it. I'll provide a short and an extended version.

Short:

Pros:
-True free to play model, i.e. no pay to win
-Decent in-game progression rate (250h on average to unlock every single mercenary with in-game currency)
-Many different mercs with very different abilities
-Team based: medic, recon, engineer, assault, fire support (ammo provider)
-Nice skins for your mercs

Cons:
-Bugs, bugs and more bugs. Old ones stay, new content brings more of them.
-Can't maintain constant fps even on medium settings on my rig (GTX 980 4GB, i7 3.6GHz, 16GB ram, 1Tb HDD)
-All matchmaking/balancing tools are horrible. (I'll go into detail as to why in the extended section)
-Poor content: 6 maps for one game mode, second mode being one half of the first one. 2 maps for the third mode.
-Server issues: connection lost, lag spikes, teleports, frequent deaths behind the wall (even with only 24ping)
-High knowledge required from new players for an effective game
-Spit in the face attitude towards the long standing community

extended version:

The game has a big variety of mercenaries, but only two are available at start. There are ammo providers with area denial abilities and the pure assault mercenaries, with either grenades or miniguns. There are health point variations between mercs making 1vs1 interesting. There are also a few snipers with no sway on their weapons (you do with this information what you want). Some neat medics with different health providing abilities and finally the engineers with tools to defend a certain point, planting, repairing and defusing faster than others.

The in-game credits can be gained pretty fast, given one plays regularly and does the different proposed missions each 3 hours. And unfortunately everything gets unlocked in under 300h. You have then still the loadout system to spend credits in. Basically, each merc has a set of 9 loadout cards which represents a unique combination of primary, secondary and melee weapon. A combination of three variants of each specific for each merc but sharing some weapons with others. Loadout come with different rarity levels. The bronze level is the base level with three augments or perks attached to each loadout. Rarer loadouts have exactly the same equipment and perks, but with a different skin. Lower than bronze loadouts, lose one perk at each level, making them worse. You start with a clean basic loadout and have to get better loadouts to reach at least bronze and be at the same level as everyone else. You can either get a case drop at the end of games, or pay 1000 in-game credits for one case.

The case system is based on randomness and you may get one random loadout of random rarity for a random merc (even one you do not have access to). You can pay for elite cases with real money this time. Elite cases contain silver as the lowest rarity you can get (it is one level of rarity above bronze). It's a money pit for people wanting a specific loadout in a specific color and rarity, but it doesn't affect the game in a pay 2 win fashion whatsoever so I don't mind.

Unfortunately what affects the game alot is the numerous bugs that keep getting introduced and bug smashing seems to not be the developpers strength. They've even once removed a type of missions since they couldn't fix what was wrong with it. Althought their official statement was the removal due to the community's request. Ehem.. sure. Bugs are plentyful and come in many colors: dissapearing abilities, throwables that don't get thrown or get thrown twice, reviving that actually kills your ally, hit detection on certain deployable models is bad, getting kicked from the game by the anti-cheat because the anti-cheat engine isn't stable and keeps crashing, etc. The list is so long by now and they keep adding more bugs at each update. There is alot of frustration involved in running into theses bugs repeatedly. Especially the horrible looping sound bugs that have been around since closed beta.

The new and recent execution mode has also brought tons of bugs with it. Overall the mode containing two maps are not enough and the copying of the counter strike mode is a failure due to the game being set in an invariable 7vs7 setting and the ability to revive people. There is little strategy involved other than moving in a pack of 7...

Finally the biggest issue of this game is the balancing/matchmaking. The competitive mode has a tendency to match you with strangers when you're playing alone and then makes you five strangers face a full pre-made team of 5 players. There's no fair matchmaking there I guarantee you. On top of that, balancing feels like its made by mokeys banging rocks together. The public matches are just the same. One game in 50 ends up being magically balanced. There is no real logic as to how players are matched with each other although the devs assure there's a hidden system. Unfortunately when you see people who are not even level 7 on one team paired up against people in the high 20's 30's it just doesn't make sense.

There is a vote shuffle function but as the system doesn't include non voters as a vote for the majority, people not wanting to vote or not noticing the vote being passed are not taken into account. This leads to many votes failing to pass, especially when a few players of the community vote "no" as for once they're in the overpowered team. Repeated stomping due to imbalanced games will do that to you.

On a final note, there is no incentive, nor forcing you to do the tutorial and many people skip it as they think it's just another shooter game. Countless times have I needed to tell people that you can revive downed allies as a medic or that as one specific merc you can provide ammo to yourself and others. There is no telling how much damage the newcomers do to the health of a game. They lack all knowledge and there is nothing forcing them to stay in their max level 5 servers. Worse! The new way the quick join functionality works is that it only allows newcomers to play execution mode where there are no level limitations, then it gives you access to the other two modes, but there is no restriction (EDIT: has been changed for the time being). Furthermore, quick join works horribly bad, sending 8 people or more from europe to an american server to fill it (although one had specified EU region) instead of opening up a new server.

All in all the game can be fun, but too many shortcoming including the total lack of listening and communication with the comunity drives me nuts regarding this game. For the latest major update (the containment war (CW) update) they gave away a merc and for those who had him already they gave two elite cases and a unique rare loadout for said merc. Once the update was live, they launched for one month containment war cases, with a 0.3% chance of getting a CW limited loadout for regular cases, elite cases got 10%. To get a guaranteed CW limited loadouts, the only way of getting one was by buying a 10 pack of CW elite cases for 35 euros. It's not really an event if only highly paying people can get it. Most dissapointing was the fact that they wanted to reward long time players by giving out those gifts, yet warned everyone two weeks before it was actually going to happen. Worse, after all the player complaints about the low drop rates and promises of change, we got a repeat of the event for Christmas with the exact same drop rates. If that isn't a spit in the face of the community, I don't know what is...

The Dirty Bomb developers don't care about their actual community unless it is the paying one and they will do everything they can to bring in new blood rather than tend to long time players. So I don't recommend playing this in its current state and especially don't recommend spending any money on it.