I’ve only managed to play three missions and several minutes of the Freeplay mode (getting the typical glitches along the way). I went into it expecting to not like it and I was very sour on it after the first mission, but I softened on it a little bit the more I played it. I still don’t think it’s good but doing the COMBOs helped quicken the pace of combat a lot.
The gunplay isn’t satisfying but considering how much you rely on your abilities I think I could probably accept it as just filler between the relatively short ability cooldowns, but I wonder how much variety you truly have in your ability loadouts. It looks like you get two offensive abilities and one defensive, and if you’re doing COMBOs then you’re going to follow a set rotation. The abilities I tried were auto-seeking projectiles so it’s not like there was a lot of finesse or depth to using them. It feels like a game flow that can get very boring very fast if you don’t have a ton of viable builds to play with and if enemies are too spongy and don’t give you the satisfaction of a kill quickly enough.
The enemies are hard to distinguish from the environment so I honestly can’t even tell if they have different behaviors or not. I just look for the red dots above their heads and shoot whatever I see. Between that and the constant explosions and special effects, visibility is very poor.
Flight is a fine thing to do but I haven’t seen any interesting integration of it into the gameplay or environment design. You can fly from checkpoint to checkpoint, which makes traversal and level design inconsequential between setpieces. But you also have an overheat meter on flight meaning actual battles turn into the more typical grounded affairs, with the occasionally float/double jump. I don’t think they ever figured out how to marry the concept of flight into the rest of the game.
I don’t get what they’re going for with the home base. I didn’t pay attention to it for variety of reasons while I was playing but walking through that town is so slow and I don’t understand why. When you first boot up the game you start so far away from the mission start location and it takes so long to actually walk there. Talking to people for missions takes forever. It’s just really badly paced.
The game has way too many loading screens during missions and it totally kills the flow. It’s like playing OG Monster Hunter.
Customization is okay. I like how you can choose textures and very bright colors, instead of everything just being very dull and understated. I can also see the micro-transactions around that aspect getting annoying because I imagine anything interesting will cost a ton of in-game money to get you to spend real money.
