YMMV / Ghost in the Shell: First Assault Online

• Annoying Video Game Helper: A minor case. It's nice to know that there's an enemy Batou player after an Arm Launcher blasted you to bits.
• Broken Base: While the game as a game is enjoyable, Ghost in the Shell fans who appreciated the series for its philosophical ruminations and intelligent writing were appalled that the franchise's license was used to create a plotless FPS multiplayer shooter and that so much more could have been done to make this a GITS game that would live up to its pedigree.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • The AK47 is favored among the playerbase due to being the most damaging assault rifle, despite its high recoil.
  • Just assault rifles in general, due to map designs that favor closer encounter more than long range combat. The change to version 2.0 set weapon restrictions to characters, so only the heaviest and slowest characters were able to use assault rifles at that point.
  • Since you can just whip out melee weapon to negate bipod's movement penalty, the attachment saw its usage on almost every single gun it can be equipped on. (Saves few players who favor mobility.)
• Game-Breaker: There were two characters who formed the Meta of the game— the must-have characters in order to win:
  • Saito and his map-wide Heat Sensor ability was widely accepted to be quite broken. Even more so when the game doesn't take the operator balance into account in Matchmaking, resulting in multiple (legit) wall-hackers on one team that see everything you do. They eventually changed Motoko's Thermoptic Camo to counter his heat sensor by not being detected by it.
  • Borma's nano-gel adds armor, HP, and insanely fast HP regeneration. Having at least 3 on a team guaranteed that all 8 players could become exceptionally difficult to kill. His skill wasn't changed at all when the game switched to version 2.0, so up until the game came to a close, Borma remained the most unbalanced character in the game. Even by the developer's own admittance, when a Borma activates his Tier 2 Nanogel, you're supposed to run away. Headshots were still a viable counter, but only if you could hit him.
• God Damned Bats: Seeker Drones. In public games you can almost guarantee that one or two players will be killed every time they are launched.
• Low-Tier Letdown: Major Kusanagi was considered one of the lesser character choices, considering her cloaking function is Predator-like in the worst way ^*  i.e., opposing players can still see an outline of her, making it useless against keen-eyed players
• No Problem with Licensed Games: Initial impressions of the game were very positive according to Steam user reviews. Youtube comments, though, were a different matter.
  • See Broken Base entry above. While it is far from what GitS fans expects, it is still a solid multiplayer shooter.
• That One Level: Port, a tight two-sided team deathmatch map with fixed spawns that narrows into 3 very small lanes, with little to no covers to protect you when crossing to the other team's turf. Expect groaning from players in waiting screen every time it gets voted. Urban City also got similar treatment due to it's two-sided nature, but was better received because of it's abundant cover in-between and flank routes that are properly spaced apart.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The change to 2.0 was not well received. The biggest complaint was assigning the characters to one of three classes that play differently and restricting weapons to certain classes. This was done for gameplay balance purposes. It meant that players could no longer run around as the nigh-invulnerable Borma spamming their nano-gel skill while getting headshots with super accurate and fast firing submachine guns. This left a lot of players salty because all the hard earned GP they worked so hard to earn in the game was used to buy specific weapons that they loved to use with their favorite character, and now they couldn't use that combination. There were also a vocal number of players who didn't like that Togusa was turned into a Support class, and was restricted to using only sniper rifles. Lore purists complained because Togusa had never so much as even touched a rifle at any point in the series, but his Seeker Drone skill was too powerful to use in close quarters with the enemy. Just after a month into 2.0, Kodansha Publishing in Japan decided that the game was no longer earning a profit, and decided to pull the plug on the game across the globe. Many players blame the change to 2.0 as the reason why the game was shut down.