Dirty Bomb - Remember brink? Here's something hopefully better

Slym

It's a video game!

Made by the people who made brink!

Wait, come back! This is actually pretty decent! Also free!

Are you sticking around yet? Okay, let me talk about this for a second. Dirty bomb is a free to play (hrm okay) heavily team-based (alright cool) fast paced (sounds good) high mobility (I can get behind that) FPS (yeah okay sounds cool) with microtranactions (WARNING WARNING). From what I've seen off of about 10 hours of play, the hooks aren't particularly bad, though you're gonna have to either spend money or do some grinding if you want to unlock all the characters and loadouts (more on that later).

While they aren't playing up the mobility aspect like they did in brink, there is a lot of mobility, you can wall jump and sprint around and while you can aim down sights, it's really only for long range, close range you're shooting from the hip and moving around a lot.

Currently, Dirty Bomb is in open beta, and has 5 maps and 14 mercs, 17 primary weapons, 9 secondary weapons, and 4 melee weapons. They've added 2 new mercs since I started playing about a month ago (I moved so there was a few weeks I was on a laptop and not playing, so 10 hours was actually rather a lot of playing for a while, just got back on my real PC and am playing again) but no new maps, though I believe they're working on a few other maps to be released by the time the game is actually out.

There are 5 different classes of mercs, each with a particular strength and role, and each has a few specific mercs who have unique abilities, speed, health and loadout choices.

ASSAULT mercs:
designed to shoot people until they're dead, they don't really do anything else.

Fragger has an assault rifle and a frag grenade (big surprise) and a lot of health. Good for getting into firefights and winning them

Nader has an SMG which isn't as powerful in a direct firefight, but has a grenade launcher which is very, very deadly. Great at indirect fire. Lowest health of the Assault classes.

Rhino has a shotgun for close range combat, and a minigun also for close range combat and also soaking places in lead. Great for making an area of the map impossible to advance through because he's there and also he has a medic. He has the most health of every merc.

FIRE SUPPORT mercs:
can resupply ammo to their teammates (way more important than you would think) an call in deadly support weapons that are great at breaking through fortified locations

Skyhammer is the basic "kill people" merc you get when you play through the tutorial. Has full-auto and burst-fire close range assault rifles. Can call in a very deadly airstrike, but needs to be fairly close to do so.

Arty is my personal favorite character, who uses semi-auto and burst fire weapons from long range and can call down an artillery barrage which is weaker than other fire support characters but faster, both in call-in time and recharge rate.

Kira is faster than the other fire support mercs but with less health, uses the same weapons as Arty, can call down a very, very deadly orbital laser from great range, but takes a long time to call in and recharge.

MEDIC mercs:
Heal people and resuscitate downed players, they all have defibrillators.

Sawbonez uses SMGs and throws health packs that heal over time, is the toughest and slowest of the medics

Aura uses shotguns and drops a health station that heals nearby friendlies. Surprisingly deadly in close range, particularly if she's standing in her station. The other free character you start the game with

Sparks is newish, I haven't played her, she uses machine pistols as a primary but has a chargable revive gun that can damage enemies which is her real primary weapon


ENGINEER mercs:
Generally good at area denial, can arm and defuse C4 and preform other objectives faster than other classes

Proxy uses shotguns or an SMG, drops proximiny mines, and is very fast. Low HP though.

Fletcher uses a different selection of shotguns and an SMG than proxy, uses sticky grenades that can be detonated manually.

Bushwacker uses SMGs and can drop a deployable auto-turret. Isn't as annoying as he sounds like he should be.

RECON mercs:
it's a sniper and a spy. end of transmission.

Vassili uses sniper rifles and machine pistols. Can throw a heartbeat sensor to reveal enemies.

Phantom uses SMGs and has a katana. Can go "invisible" and sneak up on people. I haven't played in a game with him yet, he's the newest character.


Okay, I'm intrigued, but tell me what the FTP shit is like

Allright. When you start up the game, you get 2 mercs for free, both with a standard loadout without any "perks" (they have a real name but they're just CoD perks so I'm calling them perks). There are also a number of mercs that they rotate through for free, so you can try them out.

Buying new mercs costs from 30k to 50k fake in-game monies. Monies can also be used to buy loadout cards, either specific bronze ones with 3 perks for 17.5k (silver gold and colbalt ones are just fancier ones with no in-game benefit, that you can buy with real money if you're silly), or buy a case for 1k which will have either lead (1 perk) copper (2 perks) bronze or a very small chance for a rarer loadout card. once you have a character with a bronze card you're as powerful as anyone else, and this happens very fast. even a default loadout without any perks doesn't put you at a disadvantage in 90% of situations, really the only thing you have to grind for is choice. having multiple mercs you can play at the 3 perk level takes a while to get to. The main way you get money is from your first game/win of the day, and missions that refresh every 3? maybe 4 hours. So it's not a great game to binge play but a fine one to sit down for half an hour or so a few times throughout the day.