 What's up everybody, I'm the Mangoozie, you were awesome and Fault recently introduced a new patch that I think has been, by far, the most significant improvement to the game yet. I'm still not on board the Fault fanboy train, but I have to admit that they done good this time. The new patch is number 0.13 and introduces a new HUD with new icons, a new store, death recap, better communication systems, it's a bunch of stuff. More importantly, they did a bit of a gameplay overhaul with improved ability casts and client prediction. They also made improvements to the visual and sound effects, something I've been complaining about for a while now. Along with the patch came new map objectives with river and gold buffs. Now some of what I'll talk about today is probably fairly old in Fault, but I haven't been playing the game so this shit is all new to me. I haven't had the best experiences with Fault and I've been waiting for some big improvements to come and it looks like they've finally arrived. I'll go in detail today and talk about the various improvements that Strange Matter has made with some Chimera and Gideon play in the background. Before I continue on though, I just want to state that while I wasn't willing to recommend that anyone drop 20 bucks on the game in the past, I think I'm comfortable saying that the game is worth it now if you've been holding out. Just bear in mind that there are free options from other studios coming down the pipe. I never truly feel comfortable recommending that anyone spend their money on anything like I don't know your financial situation. Let's talk about the gameplay improvements first as I feel that's the most important part. In the past, ability casts, even melee abilities, have felt a bit awkward and clunky with a touch of lag between when you cast the ability and the ability actually firing, if the ability ever fired. For the most part, that's gone now. I've played Decker, Richter, Gideon and Chimera and while there are still a few wonky things here and there, I was overall impressed. It no longer felt like I was fighting the game more than the enemy. And Kai felt especially improved with the updated input buffering system that they added. This allows you to queue up one ability while casting another. A major example is Chimera using Unleash immediately after an ambush. This is the kind of thing where you want those fast attacks from Unleash as soon as you hit the target and that's possible now. Used to be with Fault that you would ambush, have to wait a split second and then Unleash. Even though it was just a split second, it still felt clunky. Not this time, I was able to jump in and immediately start hacking away at people. Same with Gideon, the transition between Void Breach is like straight line big ol' turd and Void Blast the turd from the sky, that was really smooth. I was also able to Zerp in and immediately ult. This was my main problem with Gideon before. I would use the wormhole to get into a good ult position and then fall all the way to the ground before I could use the ultimate. The gameplay was the most significant improvement for Fault. Everything felt crisp and intuitive this time. They improved the visual effects, which I didn't really notice much. They did say in the patch notes that the improvements were more for future implementation of like additional heroes, so I guess I wasn't supposed to notice anything. The sound effects were also improved in that I noticed. Strange Matter sound effects suuuuucked. But they're pretty good now. Hits sounded and felt like hits. I enjoyed the shattering glass sound of getting a last hit and I was able to locate a decent taking my jungle by audio input alone. On to the map. They added some buff camps with a mana regen and XP buff on either side of the mid lane, a health and mana regen buff near off lane, and a gold buff near duo lane. This adds a few more things to fight over on the map, but be careful they take a lot to kill. I went in expecting to 3 shot it with basic attacks like the old bug buff, but these fuckers take some doing to bring down. The buffs show up on the side of your character model and you can stack multiple buffs. The new UI is out, which is something the community has been pissed off about for a while now. Personally, I don't care a whole hell of a lot about the UI. As long as something isn't glaringly broken, I'm pretty much cool with whatever. But they did a lot of cool shit, so let's talk about it. The HUD is improved with more information. They have new icons for pretty much everything. The store has better recommended items and a quick buy option. I was still a touch confused by the store at some points, but that's just a lack of experience on my part using it. They also added a death recap into the game. Unfortunately, the key bind for the death recap is what I use for ward placement, so I never did pull it up and I never did remap it. Nice feature to have though to tell who's hitting stupid hard on the enemy team. They changed the ping system, I'm not sure how, but I can say that I had an easier time using callouts than I did in Paragon. It's still basically the same setup, but it was intuitive to the point that I don't even know what they did with it. The highest praise you can get, I think. They also added a new scoreboard, but for real, as I've mentioned, I couldn't give two shits about the UI as long as the game functions well and they've achieved that, so cool beans. As you can tell, I'm really impressed with everything Strange Matter has done. There are still some small inconsistencies with Paragon that take some getting used to and I know, I know, it's not Paragon, it's Fault. When I rocket boost on Decker while moving backwards, I expect to boost away from the enemy team, not jump straight into them. This is something I think all the Parazombies will be plagued with, living under the shadow of Paragon, but Fault in the past didn't feel bad because it was a Paragon knockoff, it just felt like a bad game. This recent patch though has turned things around so that I do notice the inconsistencies with Paragon instead of raging at my screen because I hit Q and nothing happened. While Strange Matter still has a long road ahead of them before they can be recognized as a true spiritual successor to our beloved Paragon, they can at least lay claim to having a good functional game now that's worth the price tag. What I want to see from them now is to take some significant steps towards cleaning up the toxicity in the community that they themselves cultivated by releasing elo ranking so early in the game's life. That's all I have for now, like the video if you enjoyed it, sub if you want, but for now, this is the Mangoo Sonning Off, you guys, have a good one. Mangooos!