Paladins
PC/Epic Games Review

Paladins is a moba-type game designed to be fast-paced first-person action, which shows a lot of promise however, there are a number of things that are going to hold back how popular the game becomes:

The first thing to mention is that (just like any online PvP game) it has a MASSIVE hacker problem in the game (even on the Epic Games version which was just released), this alone is going to drive off a lot of new players or keep people from even trying it if they are aware of the problem.  The only people that are likely to stick around will be those that are also using hacks or those that are hanging onto hoping they can get into enough decent matches without hackers to be able to somehow consider the game as tolerable, however enjoyable will probably be a statement that hackers can make a statement...  While the game does have an anti-hacking system implemented, it's obviously not enough to stop people from hacking it...

There's also no report function in the game that I can see, so anybody being abusive or breaking ToS by hacking are going to get away with it because there's literally no way to file any reports to bring the matter to the attention of those that need to take care of the issue.  This is similar to the situation of Dragon Ball Xenoverse (in my case, on PS3), which also didn't have a report function, as for whether there will be any retaliation against those that write negative reviews due to shortfalls of functions as was in the case of DBX, that's still to be seen (I can affirm there will be additional negative reviews as a result if that is the case)...

It also appears that the game is severely unoptimized, resulting in frequent freezes of the game (particularly at the ends of matches) & almost guaranteed deaths when it happens while the match is still running.  This alone is probably a good enough reason to hold off on playing the game until it runs better, as your stats are going to suffer to technical issues, if not to the hackers, regardless of your skill level...  In my attempts to play the game, I ALWAYS get a freeze at the end of missions (watching some streams on Twitch, I found that this is not normal & I didn't expect it to be) & will start publishing videos of these problems to show freezing issues that prevent the game from being played normally.  Additionally, some of these freezes have frozen up the game entirely, leaving me with only the option to shut down the game; this has negated me from battle rewards before & the time I spent in that run was nothing but wasted time...  Another time I was stuck with a black screen after the end of the first round, I could hear shooting in the distance, but was unable to see anything, nor could I hear my own actions; this was another one where I had to kill the game (I did at least get rewards on this one when the game started back up).

Another thing that is more of an annoyance than anything is you will get thrown prompts to pay into the games microtransactions fairly regularly (usually ever few missions), getting hit by one of these when you start up the game is fairly regular & to be expected.  You don't have to pay anything into the game itself, but you will continued to get pestered by these prompts regardless.  Microtransactions are mostly for cosmetic items, which don't really effect the game, but you'll find that you can also jumpstart your game by paying $20 for the starter pack which will give you all heroes right off the bat, so the game definitely has that pay to win element as well, so this might be a reason to avoid the game as well.  Note that some items in the game can ONLY be acquired through microtransactions, for that reason, it is advisable that if you consider yourself a collector in games & don't like microtransactions, that you should probably pass on this game.

A personal gripe is that certain buttons can not be rebound & this particular issue is one that I also ran into in Evolve.  The Enter key is your text chat key, there's no way to change that binding, even if you attempt to bind that key to another function & because Enter on the numpad usually is my jump key (Enter functions the same regardless of whether it's pressed on the keyboard), I'll hit that in an attempt to jump & instead stopping myself in my tracks because the game thinks I'm trying to chat.  In Evolve, I changed that button to decimal on the numpad because what I usually use for jumping is hardcoded, which I had to do in Evolve also, but it does take some time to get used the fact that I can't use my normal button for jumping because now allow rebinding of certain buttons.

Another problem is related to account linking, which in it's own is a good idea as it gives you benefits for doing so, but additionally, every account you link also gives additional information to the publishers of the game.  While I don't see the publishers of Paladins misusing that information, it does point out that there are some risks in doing so, especially when it's done with unknown apps that request you to link your accounts with their software/platforms.  Hi-Rez is reputable enough that I don't have this concern, but there is another concern regarding this.  One of them is there's a quest in my logs that require "Viewer Points".  I had to do a search online to find out what these were (the game itself doesn't actually explain this) & these points appear to have something to do with a Mixer account.  Unfortunately I don't have a Mixer account (I must've linked 6 or 7 accounts with my Hi-Rez account, Mixer wasn't one of them) & I don't intend on making one solely for this purpose, nor does the game allow you to swap out quests even if you haven't linked a required account to complete it (how you are getting quests for social platforms you haven't linked is beyond me).  You can swap out one daily quest per day if you don't like one (you may not like multiple of those quests, but you can only swap out one), but this "Viewer Points" quest is on a separate tab that does now allow swapping them out, so it's one that will never be completed on my account...

The hacker problem as well as the technical issues has been enough for me to reconsider whether I even want to continue playing it only after a few days of playing it & whether I would be better off uninstalling it & not touching it again (it might be worth trying the Steam version to see if it functions any better over the Epic Games version).  For now, I'm still attempting to play it, however I'm only playing until dailies are completed for that day, then I move onto something else.  Paladins currently has too many problems of a severe nature to really consider continued playing beyond completion of the dailies & possibly to even continue playing entirely (we'll see after the next patch if any of these technical issues are resolved), while a decision hasn't been made as of yet as to whether I'm going to bury the game & not touch it again, one thing that is certain is that any gameplay in it will be minimal, not going beyond completion of the dailies.