This is the most trash encounter design I've encountered since Deep Roads ...
That was the most blistering review I've read so far. Damn dude, that's heavy.
There are many issues with the expansion:
1) I felt victim to the Controlled Zone mechanic. Basically at the beginning of the expansion after a certain event I was looking for a pirate's squad. Without knowing I've entered an area close to Citadel of Life, I saw pirates, I DIDN'T ATTACK and I left.
On return 20 hours later I cannot enter that area without all pirates aggro-ing on my position. Yeah, it doesn't matter that I have permission to travel their areas or that I did not kill any of them. I'm safe as long as I don't enter that particular area.
2) I've went through 4 assaults of natives on my base cause I did not know about the mines. The thing is: the safety of the expedition went from excellent to worse even when I did most of the killing and I did not lose one single Aegis soldier to the natives. Rubbish encounter design which requires you to go get the mines asap. Not to mention that the NPCs AI is braindead.
3) Junkyard was an outstanding and brilliant way to introduce a new mob: the mutants and their dogs. None of the expansion's locations are as memorable as Depot A, in fact they are mostly similar/copy-pasted structures filled with the same mobs. However we are not speaking about one, two or three locations, we are speaking of 6 similar locations! Yeah, I cannot wait to explore them all. No to mention that there are places were the cameras see you through the walls.
Edit: I just realized that they have to be 6 locations and 6 corporations because Six is the answer. Lame joke.
4) I play on Hard but the amount of enemies in encounters is simply unreasonable. I kill 3/2 enemies each round and I do crowd control with grenades however one wrong step and I'm surrounded by 3 crabs with a deathwish. Ok, this doesn't sounds so bad but why they pop-up even when you go stealth!? There is no excuse for such a design decision. Forcing the player to play your content in a certain way (*combat*) is a big No-No.
5) It's no fun! I cannot complain about backtracking as in Deep Caverns but the situation is not much better: the design is so retarded that you are forced to slog through each locations. If you stealth then you get fucked because at some point the enemies will trigger anyway. That's why my solution was to kill every Stone mob on the levels. I cannot imagine playing the expansion with a melee character. It's not challenging, it's tedious.
6) The combat. I did not want to open the discussion but it's bad because the RNG is retarded. I'm level 24 with max Perception, max Guns and lvl 70 Rapid Spearhead. However each time I start combat it's a complete shit show: sometimes Snipe works, sometimes it doesn't, sometimes Aimed Shot works, sometimes it doesn't. You cannot count on the percentage displayed by the game: 70%+ hit chance are missed shots. For example do a test: reload the same savegame and start combat. Some times you will hit 3 criticals and other times you will have 3 misses in a row. No joke. RNG makes the difference between these opposites. It should not work like this and the RNG should be toned down considering that I have a weapon with low damage spread.
7) What is the purpose of this expansion? Mindless slaughter of retarded enemies!? Huge lore dumps about Lemurians!? Here is one idea: the vanilla game was in need of some polishing (badly) therefore why don't you spend some effort on that part!? Fix Drones vs Protectorate quest, fix Gorsky's quest, tone down Deep Caverns retardiness, expand Camp Hathor/Lower Underrail in an organic way, add 2-3 secret facilities with personality, add intelligent quests and so on. Underrail has one thing going for it: the combat mechanics are excellent however you cannot base your entire franchise on combat. Yeah, they decided to double down on combat but this doesn't mean the expansion or their future titles will be good. It just shows that the game designer is unwilling to learn from his mistake and it's unwilling to go out of his comfort zone. Do some detective quests for fuck sake. Just do anything not related to combat. And don't get me started on that musical puzzle.
Edit:
8) The expansion setting and the Pirates faction in particular doesn't make sense what so ever. What ships are they actually plundering? The ships of the natives!? I'm not sure the great designer put a lot of thought in the rationale of their existence. This is the same type of thinking that added jetpacks to Elex because ... it's cool.
I love Underrail and I have 350+ hours put into it however I don't like the direction it has taken. I was excited for this expansion. Now, I need 1-2 days to recover.
