It's useful to practise or to get a sense if you want to invest your money in GeoGuesser or not. However, with this free steam edition you only play against bots - yeah, I only played against 1 IRL person over 100+ matches that you can tell by their name and loadout.
Once you have 10 wins, you can continue to play from the beginning against bots in a non-league or pay 1 year of subscription to continue in your league - preferably Gold 2 or 3.
This subscription plan for this "game" is worse than paying for an MMORPG because here, there are no incentives at all (daily/weekly quests/missions/raids,etc.) to come back to it regularly... Basically you buy it, spend some days or maximum weeks playing it, then gets boring and difficult without learning and memorizing meta.
If they ever change the subscription model to a permanent product, it's alright!

I'd say like 99% of actual players play this game to complete the achievements which can be done in 1-2 rounds if you are good at it. However, the game has some minor bugs that haven't been fixed for a long time, including power-ups leaving your screen when you are about to enter the "tunnel" part of the map.
I also got a very bad motion sickness after playing it for a while...

I spent my 20+ hours in this game back in 2021. Today I gave it another try and to my surprise it became horrible after putting TDM mode behind 1000 Technology Points or whatever it is called. I went a FFA match, waited like 4 minutes while searching for players and got into a 1vs1 matchup against a more experienced player. Yeah, I got beaten very quickly, I don't know the "meta".
I wouldn't recommend this "F2P" game to anyone as it just got worse with adding new DLCs in the last 4 years instead of developing the campaign or just simply balancing factions.

Where should I start...?

I have never enjoyed a game as much as Foxhole in my 20+ years of gaming history, no wonder I put 3k hours into it in less than 2 years (~125 days). The idea behind the game is just wonderful, you can do whatever you want: everything you do has an impact on the outcome of the war, including scrapping, logistics, building, fighting, partisaning and maintaining.

Let me share my 3k hours experience with you:
-However the amount of joy coming from these activities are not equally provided: builders get zero acknowledgements whereas if you transport some goods to a frontline with full pop, you can just easily climb the rank ladder, no matter whether your resources were useful or not. Ranks don't give any advantages of course. Have you ever tried rebuilding a frontline that moved? Well, good luck mammoning the tier 2 trenches with a total of 66 mammons for a single trench completely dehusked, filling in craters alone, or simply destroying unwanted/badly placed friendly structures to get weapon restricted every 20 minutes.

- Alts (secondary accounts) are a serious problem indeed. Other games issue hardware bans, here they get a couple of hours timeout and can continue their behaviour the same as before, probably unnoticed. They drive free tanks, loaded freighters and trucks to the enemy or sink them, destroy friendly structures (like bridges or generator rooms for Storm Cannons) or modify garrison modifications so it stops teching overnight. They get access to regiment stockpiles and dump them into water, enemy hands or release them to public. You may ask why public goods are bad? Pulling from public takes years compared to private stockpiles, so good luck pulling thousands of crates. (Basically alts are partisans, but you can't really catch and punish them..)

- Mid/Frontline resource fields become useless over time. It is completely a waste of time to gather resources in the midline and to transport them to backline refineries even with the help of trains.

- Factories were hyped so much when they came out that everyone started building facilities, which eventually decayed in 2-5 days since the lack of maintenance and high Garrison Supply consumption. So many resources and time wasted on facilities even as of today.

- In the beginning, I spent countless hours of trying to understand some of the game logics by reading the unofficial Foxhole wiki, maintained by some volunteers. The game lacks of ingame instructions for new players. There is a training field in the home region, but for example how to claim a border base is not explained AT ALL, which should be compulsory... I could mention dozens of others like the above mentioned.

- Nevertheless, the main issue is the balance of the game. Developers promised to keep the game assymmetric which in theory sounds a good idea, but very hard to maintain to avoid being one technology/side OP then balancing (= completely nerfing) so the other faction gets the advantage.
- Although the technology tree got a final shape by the War 100 so it is much easier to follow and understand (no tech skip anymore, no tech choices in a single tier anymore, Iron and Alu requirements were cut off by a 0 digit, and proto vehicle kits can now be built with bmats and repairable with hammer unlike many wars before when proto tanks cost rmat and could be repaired only in garages and not by hammer). Unfortunately most new players don't even know what alu and iron/copper are used for because of the lack of instructions. Especially with the facility update, you can't directly build/MPF (Mass Produce) all types of tanks.
- It is extremely hard to stream Foxhole because of streamsnipers and intel-leak. When 1.0 came out, 8 out of 10 supported streamers were on Colonial side, even nowadays it is still more preferred than the Warden side. Simps and followers and even other faction's alts would go to say hi/kill the streamer for 1 minute fame.
- Every region has a counterpart in this assymmetric world, which are very often unbalanced. Some parts of the map should be reworked. Normal North vs South layout, Wardens start with Loggerhead with 3 bridges to be attacked from, while its counterpart Fort Duncan can be attacked only from 1 bridge. Lockheed can be captured from south with 1 single tank because with the rapid decay zone, you literally can't build any defenses south of the TH, compared to its counterpart Mercy's Wish which can be defended from all sides. Also, there is the bulwark (the huge wall) in the south with only a few gaps (usually covered with AI/ghouses) to cross that makes very hard for partisans from north side to cross. In the north, there is nothing stopping you to cross to any of the northern hexagons. Camp Omicron and Anchor Beach are also in my top5 list to be reworked due to their closeness to the border/rapid decay zone.
- Satchels (Alligator Charge) in lategame just ruin the game. You get 1 person with a Heavy Machine Gun to suppress rifle/MG garrisons while the other destroys in less than 5 mins the structures that were built/teched by hard work of lots of people in the past couple of real time days.
- And one of the most crucial problem of the game: the population. People lose interest over time, structures are not planned to upkeep for 40+ days (like War 100), nightcap can't be QRF-ed (especially satchel charges overnight), etc. This map is not designed for 1200 players at low-peak hours for sure, but 2000 players on a typical weekday is not enough either. It affects both the winning and the losing side as well: obviously it is always demoralizing to be on the losing/defending side, but the long queues (30-40 players with 1 hour+ queue) on the winning side are a pain as well.
- Finally of course lots of bugs, glitches, server lags, etc. are on my list.

The game in its current state is not recommended: devs aren't listening to player feedback and always favorize only one faction. I lost interest, I don't enjoy playing it anymore as much as I have done in the last 2 years. Ah yeah, devs want to release Anvil, the Foxhole copy in medieval times so probably the playerbase from Foxhole will shift to Anvil eventually. Don't support these devs!

PS: You can call me a salty vet, but before you do, read other "salty vet" reviews on steam as well. ;) Thank you!

After the worst start in gaming history, this game offers a wide range of activities with lots of free updates and contents. It is definitely worth buying.

Devs can ban you for no reason in case a (random) member of your clan cheats or uses exploits.

Before making any comments regarding cheating, hacking, scripting, etc., please read the WHOLE story. Thanks!

Back in 2019, I was a part of a clan called “KOREAN GODS”, with about 6-7 members, playing on Official server #1111 PVP (EU). There were about 3 guys of us who played almost non-stop on the server, but the rest of us only joined to the server for either having fun, or simply being AFK during raid time to show presence that our clan is online. As for myself, I completed 100% of the steam achievements during this period (most of them completed about 2019, 20, April, and some later on 8 May). As for a little add, there were multiple clans with identically the same name KOREAN GODS (maybe some with non-capital letters), just like my ingame name (on #1111) was Night King, and another (random/non-clan member) player was NightKing (without space).
After about a week later my non-stop online friends told us that they can’t join the servers anymore for NO REASON. The others - including myself - also checked if we could connect to official servers, but unfortunately we couldn’t join either. We can play on private servers, and also in Singleplayer, but can’t play on official servers. If you have ever played survival games like Rust, I am sure you know that Official server is a real challenge, unlike private/modded servers.

In 2020, I appealed the ban by contacting admins on their forum and I got the following reply after 1 month:

"Hello <myforumname>, our team has reviewed the process, unfortunately, it was determined that these bans may not be appealed as an exploit that caused an intentional interruption of our services was abused, which is the most severe breach of our terms of conduct."

In this article they offered the lift of Legacy bans back in 2020, but it didn't help either. My concern is that I simply still don't know the exact reason why I was banned.
And yes, I've seen level 10 naked guy with sleeping glitch wiping all of us with 1st hit spear poison+bleed+cripple attack. Interesting huh?

Also some DLC clothes were like "P2W" because you couldn't craft some basic (non-DLC) clothes for specific weather conditions...

One of my top 5 most played games in my steam library!
The sounds, the scenery, the players and the different maps make this game really well-made. There are many opportunities that you can make so even after long hours it won't be boring unlike other games, because you can play as Squad Lead, Infantry, Tank operator, Scout, Pilot or simply Support (logistics and/or super FOB-ing with TOWs and mortars). Not to mention the multiple factions with their own weapons, vehicles, tools and buildings respectively.

If you wanted to compare with other games, I would say a really realistic game as Escape from Tarkov (no hitmarks), open-world with vehicles as Arma 3, respawn system and customization as in Red Orchestra and Rising Storm series, but if you just want to kill everyone because you are used to the fast paced CoD series, then this game is not for you: a map can take up to 1,5 hours!

Regular updates with the feedback of players are always released by the helpful devs! And one more thing: the game isn't dead, the servers are mostly full. So don't worry, it's not Battalion 1944.

Crap gameplay. Not to mention "P2P is lost."