Ol' Willy
Arcane
Finished SS2 for the first time just yesterday and decided to share my extremely important™ opinion with everybody. No mods, just community patch. I didn't play it before because people around often compare SS2 and Bioshock and I'm not really a fan of the latter. But SS2 is a good stuff. Plot is good, and while at the first glance it looks like mix of Alien and generic zombie stuff in space, it's little bit deeper, with interesting twists. Liked audio logs, most of it game-wise useless but helps with immersion. Every characters gets a userpic in email and this is a nice little touch. Voice acting is pleasant. Level design is good. Levels are huge and mazey, and at first it's easy to get "where the fuck should I go" state, but after some time of wandering around things start to make sense. In one occasion I needed some particular chemical, so I checked three or four chemicals storages on different decks and had no problem reaching them as fast as possible. Game surely looks good, both graphics and style wise.
But gameplay is something that I have mixed feeling of. SS2 is very linear. Game rarely offers you a flanking route or alternate path to your goal. When the game threw me at two laser turrets for the first time I thought: there should be some way to bypass or circumvent them, some alternate routes - like in Thief or DE1. Nope. Level designer expects you to destroy or hack those turrets head on. And so on. Turrets, large groups of enemies, you are expected to wipe them all. Not a very "survival horror", innit? And stealth is nonexistent. Yea, you could sneak up on enemy and make a surprise hit, but you can't avoid most of the combat. Enemies are not that hard (I played on hard 'cause easy is for wimps, normal for pedestrians and impossible for masochists) and in time they became just a nuisance. You can safely slay every enemy type in the game without taking any damage, or with as little as possible. Even if you use melee weapons, just learn the dance and go on. Rumblers go down from laser rapier with amazing ease. Hit - kite - watch it telegraph its attack - reach - hit - until dead. And even if you take a hit or two - just wait until your health is low enough, make a dash to nearest surgeon deck and fully heal for measly 5 nannities. While I was low on med hypos, I collected dozen huge medikits and used only two aside from boss fights. And yeah, armor doesn't degrade. Hacking is marginally useful, but doesn't change much.
And what about the famed "scarcity of resources", ammo and durability in this case? Psy-hypos, ammo, tools are rare. So you should use them sparingly. How, when fights are unavoidable? And why, when game flips a bird and has melee weapons OP as fuck? They don't degrade, don't need ammo, kill everything with ease. Proper melee build can steamroll the game at any difficulty. This really makes enemies a nuisance because they don't give you any XP and most of them don't drop any loot. Combat is not the best part of this game, this is Dark Engine after all, not ID Tech 2. Not to say that encounter design is really lacking and game rarely throws separate types of enemies at you - let's say, one grenade throwing mutant, couple shahid bots rushing at you and one ninja lurking around and sniping you. That would be a challenge. Instead - run - encounter monkey - beat it to death - run further - encounter mydwife - beat her to death - ran some more - encounter ninja - beat him to death - and so on.
All in all, it's not that I dislike the gameplay so much - but surely there's something missing. Incentive to kill enemies - in form of XP or loot, so killing stuff would become profitable? More interesting combat encounters to go full FPS? Or ways to stealth and avoid combat altogether coupled with more dangerous and unforgiving enemies?
But gameplay is something that I have mixed feeling of. SS2 is very linear. Game rarely offers you a flanking route or alternate path to your goal. When the game threw me at two laser turrets for the first time I thought: there should be some way to bypass or circumvent them, some alternate routes - like in Thief or DE1. Nope. Level designer expects you to destroy or hack those turrets head on. And so on. Turrets, large groups of enemies, you are expected to wipe them all. Not a very "survival horror", innit? And stealth is nonexistent. Yea, you could sneak up on enemy and make a surprise hit, but you can't avoid most of the combat. Enemies are not that hard (I played on hard 'cause easy is for wimps, normal for pedestrians and impossible for masochists) and in time they became just a nuisance. You can safely slay every enemy type in the game without taking any damage, or with as little as possible. Even if you use melee weapons, just learn the dance and go on. Rumblers go down from laser rapier with amazing ease. Hit - kite - watch it telegraph its attack - reach - hit - until dead. And even if you take a hit or two - just wait until your health is low enough, make a dash to nearest surgeon deck and fully heal for measly 5 nannities. While I was low on med hypos, I collected dozen huge medikits and used only two aside from boss fights. And yeah, armor doesn't degrade. Hacking is marginally useful, but doesn't change much.
And what about the famed "scarcity of resources", ammo and durability in this case? Psy-hypos, ammo, tools are rare. So you should use them sparingly. How, when fights are unavoidable? And why, when game flips a bird and has melee weapons OP as fuck? They don't degrade, don't need ammo, kill everything with ease. Proper melee build can steamroll the game at any difficulty. This really makes enemies a nuisance because they don't give you any XP and most of them don't drop any loot. Combat is not the best part of this game, this is Dark Engine after all, not ID Tech 2. Not to say that encounter design is really lacking and game rarely throws separate types of enemies at you - let's say, one grenade throwing mutant, couple shahid bots rushing at you and one ninja lurking around and sniping you. That would be a challenge. Instead - run - encounter monkey - beat it to death - run further - encounter mydwife - beat her to death - ran some more - encounter ninja - beat him to death - and so on.
All in all, it's not that I dislike the gameplay so much - but surely there's something missing. Incentive to kill enemies - in form of XP or loot, so killing stuff would become profitable? More interesting combat encounters to go full FPS? Or ways to stealth and avoid combat altogether coupled with more dangerous and unforgiving enemies?
In the body of the many there is a nerve cluster in a room with water, I couldn't reach it with my melee weapons, so I had to scrounge for a gun to shoot it with. 
