OpenfrontReviews of openfront.io

I tried to play on the main browser I use (Firefox), a massive advertisement covered the whole page. I couldn't exit out of the advertisement or do anything. I switched to Chrome because I actually wanted to try the game out. A nation with 8k managed to defeat an invasion of over 100k. Game is obviously broken, and I can guarantee someone could edit a single client-side file to cheat and win.

Ads pedophile mods who have biased moderation and overuses their power.

Ads block core functionality of the game while using firefox browser. Unplayable

I genuinely wanted to like OpenFront. I really did. I came to this game after getting tired of waiting to renew my Hearts of Iron IV DLC subscription, and I found quite a lot to appreciate. The variety of maps is refreshing, the sandbox nature of the game is enjoyable, and there is a surprising amount of strategic depth for something that can be picked up and played directly in a browser. Unfortunately, the single-player AI completely killed the experience for me. The difficulty curve is absolutely ridiculous. On Easy, I can practically sleepwalk through a game. On Medium, I win essentially every time without having to seriously optimize anything. Then you select Hard and suddenly the game goes from "strategy game" to "economic survival horror." The problem isn't that the Hard AI is particularly intelligent. The problem is that it receives enormous statistical advantages. Hard and Impossible AI nations receive substantially increased population growth, troop capacity, starting troops, economic advantages, and other bonuses. The AI can absorb losses that would be catastrophic for a human player and recover from them far faster than should reasonably be possible. So instead of feeling like I am fighting a smarter opponent, I feel like I am fighting an opponent who has been handed a second economy by the developers. And this creates a ridiculous difficulty gap: Medium: I win 100% of my games. Hard: I can spend an entire game making sensible economic and military decisions and still get buried underneath an AI nation that simply produces more troops and resources than I can possibly match. I have played around twenty Hard games. I won exactly one. And even that victory wasn't because I had suddenly become good enough to consistently overcome Hard AI. It happened on Deglaciated Antarctica, where the geography gave me an unusually advantageous spawn that allowed me to isolate myself, rapidly consume tribes, and eventually use nuclear weapons to harass much larger AI nations. In other words, my most successful Hard strategy was essentially: "Find a map where geography lets me circumvent the AI's statistical advantages and then commit nuclear war crimes." At some point, that stops being challenging and starts being exhausting. I have played Hearts of Iron IV's April 27th, 1945 Endsieg scenario as Germany (mod, not vanilla). You know, the scenario where Germany is surrounded, being bombed into oblivion, has virtually no strategic depth left, and the Soviets have surrounded Berlin on all sides. I won that. Multiple times, might I add. OpenFront Hard mode has somehow managed to make me more frustrated than that. The fundamental problem is that there is no satisfying difficulty level for someone in my position. Medium is too easy. Hard is miserable. And I don't play video games to voluntarily give myself psychological damage. I understand why developers sometimes give AI economic bonuses. Computer opponents have limitations, and compensating for those limitations can be necessary. But there is a point where "AI assistance" becomes "the AI plays a different game from you." If Hard mode were primarily a smarter AI with roughly equal economic rules, I would gladly lose. If I lost because the AI outmaneuvered me, expanded more intelligently, chose better targets, or exploited my mistakes, I would actually learn something from the defeat. Instead, far too often, the lesson seems to be: "You made good decisions. Too bad, the AI has 2x the stuff." That isn't the kind of difficulty I enjoy. Overall, I genuinely think OpenFront has a good game buried underneath all of this. The maps are interesting, the basic mechanics are fun, and the sandbox potential is considerable. But the single-player difficulty system has reached the point where playing Hard is no longer entertaining for me, while playing Medium provides no meaningful challenge. So I've decided to stop playing it and leave this negative review. Not because I couldn't win Hard, not because I expect to win every game, but because I eventually realized that I was spending my free time becoming progressively angrier at a browser strategy game. There are better uses for my cortisol.

It's a good game, I know I can't prove it but people that pay win more games. I think they gain advantages which I find stupid.

this is me verifying I'm human not AI - THIS GAME WAS FUN BUT NOW WHEN I TRY TO ATTACK I HAVE TO MANUALLY PUT UP MY BUILDS OR I CANT FIGHT INSTEAD OF CLICKING TO THE SIDE FLUCK YALL FOR RUINING THE GAME

j'adords le jeux, mais je suis nul, donc j'aime pas le jeux

Do not play it sucks. Game just sucks the bots are complete trolls and owners ruined it.