As a big shooter fan, MeinMMO author Dariusz Müller is dissatisfied with the current selection of PvP titles. Now he has surprisingly found fun again with a 3-year-old tactical shooter and hopes that it can keep him entertained until the next big release.
The shooter market has offered few exciting innovations for months and so I have been dissatisfied with the current selection of shooters for a long time.
It also feels like every new shooter is a battle royal or EFT-like – and I’m not a fan of either subgenre. I’m probably not the only shooter fan looking at the market and not knowing what to play.
The big franchises only brought one disappointment after another:
For a long time my “rock in the surf” was Rainbow Six Siege. I kept returning to the tactical shooter, but at the moment I’ve completely lost the fun of the game. This is partly due to changes that I personally don’t like and partly due to the ongoing big cheater problem.
3 year old shooter grabs my ambition and suddenly becomes fun
After jumping from shooter to shooter over the course of the year, I returned to Valorant after a long break. I played the title from Riot Games for a few hours in 2021, but lost interest again before level 30.
I didn’t feel like unlocking the various agents or investing the time to learn their skills. What I wanted to play instead in 2021 were movement shooters. I wanted to jump, slide and dropshot and not stand still while shooting so that my weapons could hit anything.
But in 2023 my ambition grabbed me and I really enjoy improving myself in Valorant. I spend several hours a week training my Aim and thinking about how to use my gadgets most effectively.
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The desire to get better is what makes Valorant interesting
In Valorant, the well-known principle applies: “Easy to learn, hard to master.” It is really not complicated to understand and use the individual skills of the agents. But it makes a huge difference how well the skills are used. Sometimes it’s small differences that have big effects.
For example, if I place my turret with the agent “Killjoy,” there are probably hundreds of pros and high-elo players who will roll their eyes and shed a tear because the position is simply not optimal. But I can learn something from exactly these players.
When I don’t have the time or feel like playing myself, I watch YouTube videos and streams with interest because I benefit from them in a fun way. In short: I’m enjoying Valorant so much right now because it ignites my ambition and makes me want to get better.
Even if I get beaten up by Smurfers and feel salty for a moment, I can ultimately get something positive out of the time I played because I can copy their tricks. In general, matches against better players spark my ambition and I play my best rounds when I’m actually inferior.
Ingenious basic framework meets isolated problems
Of course I want to be honest with you. There is no such thing as the perfect game. Valorant also has problems. The sometimes extremely toxic player base is probably one of the biggest and things can get really unpleasant in the shooter, especially for women.
The smurf problem is also very critical. So especially in the lower to middle ranks, you regularly have smurfers in the match – both on the opposing team and among random players on your own team. We can only hope that our own Smurfer is better.
Both can be really frustrating, which is why I completely understand if someone doesn’t like the shooter. Still, Valorant is straight for me technically one of the best competitive shooters – if not the best.
The servers are incredibly stable, the hitbox works extremely confidently and the Peekers Advantage1 is nowhere near as bad as in other shooters. I’ve been playing the shooter for several hours a day for months now and have never had any FPS drops or game crashes. Valorant runs damn confidently and has a strong performance – even comparatively low-performance PCs have sufficient FPS.
You also hardly ever encounter cheaters in Valorant because Vanguard, the anti-cheat system, does a really excellent job. When I’m gaming, I can concentrate entirely on what I enjoy in a shooter: concentrated, competitive gameplay with the basic idea of getting better.
I’m finally having fun learning and mastering a shooter again and that’s why I hope I continue to enjoy Valorant as much as I do now in the next few months or years.
If you want to discover more shooters:
The 14 best multiplayer shooters of 2023 for PC, Switch, PS4, PS5 and Xbox