Too easy, yet too punishing

I had a good time playing through with my friends, but we found the game a little too straight forward to really get into; it never felt that we were even at risk of failing a mission or that we needed to play carefully. Enemy density was usually fairly low and individual enemies are very easy to take down. The enemy AI felt dumb and would either charge suicidally or just stand still.

When we did die however, it felt sudden and unavoidable. We think the main cause of this was that there isn’t very much feedback when you get hit, and it’s especially easy to lose your armour without noticing.

The exception was the final mission, which we actually failed the entire campaign over. We weren’t sure whether we were supposed to fight off the horde or push through it: obviously, rushing did not work out. It seemed like we probably weren’t supposed to stay and fight them because the narration was telling us to rush to the exit before reinforcements arrive, and there was far more enemies than any time in the rest of the campaign.

Additional notes:

• Skills did not feel impactful at all. This is presumably supposed to be one of the main sources of replayability but we just felt apathetic towards them.

• End of mission feels anticlimactic as it just suddenly ends in the middle of a firefight. A couple times enemies would continue shooting at us after the mission ended, which was really loud and annoying.

• We all felt dead drops felt ‘rigged’ in an annoying way: it seemed like it would spin longer/shorter (sometimes significantly) just to avoid landing on purple. If it does actually do this, it would probably feel less unfair if it span for the same duration every time and purple items just appeared less often.

• It’s not really clear if this is meant to be a tactical shooter. There are tactical mechanics, but enemies don’t usually deal a lot of damage nor take a lot of damage to kill, so they don’t really seem necessary or even useful.

• Stealth did not seem fun or efficient so we didn’t do it. There is not much incentive to avoid combat because combat is not that risky and much faster.

• Non-lethal weapons do not seem weak enough to justify a higher reward for using them: my teammates were even jealous of the power of my taser. This may however be a side effect of combat being too easy in general, they did fall off in effectiveness later in the campaign.

• The effective range of SMGs felt too far. This could be realistic (the ranges in this game don’t generally get that long), but it would make more sense for them to drop off quicker to make the range upside of rifles more significant.

• Tactical items like ladders and breaching charges were cool but never felt needed. Things like this definitely shouldn’t be required to progress, but it never felt like we were short of options that didn’t consume expensive resources.