The visual clutter is insane, especially so in the later stages of the game. I had to set the dynamic lighting, the fog and level decorations to low and blood amount first to low and then to family friendly. Otherwise you can't see shit what's happening on the screen.
Picture from the internet to show how bad even the damage effects alone are.
Levels are procedurally generated and at one point they all start to feel the same even though they have different themes, they all look like Minecraft tunnels made of the same assets but with different textures.
And there's too much of them, Jesus Christ this game is a bloat. 3 chapters, each has 9 episodes, each has 3 levels. So 81 level + arenas. There's a Redux mode which make each episode only have 1 level instead of 3 and makes every level bigger with more enemies (and disables achivements) I speedrunned the first chapter before uninstalling the game, and this mode is indeed better than playing as intended imo.
The music is fine, made by the same dude from Amid Evil, Doom Eternal, Dusk. This time it's metal again. It has the same issue as Morrowind — the music is good but there's not enough of it for the size of the game. It gets repititve very quickly.
The gunplay is good, the best thing about the game. Lots of guns, each has a weight behind the shots. But it's not just retro shooter, it's also a roguelite and that's where my issues lie. First of all, the rng can be just cruel in general. Each gun has a tier 1-3 and random statuses like faster reload, elemental damage, worse or better ammo consumption etc. After completing every level you can only keep one tier 1 gun and later can have upgrades for higher levels and more guns. If you're lucky you can get a great wepon in the second level of the game (I got a legendary tier 1 vampiric chainsaw with faster attack rate). Or you can keep getting trash and dying repeatedly because sometimes it's not about your skills it's just a lack of luck.
It's still easy in the early levels of the game, but somewhere around the middle the enemies are statring to turn into bullet sponges and complete this transition in the 3rd chapter. They also start hitting hard and a couple of shotgunners can kill you in seconds. I got a couple of situations when the rng desided to lock me up in a small 5×5 arena with teleporting enemies and immediately throw 10+ hitscanning shotgunners + summoners who can summon INDEFINITELY untill killed + an armored elite throwing homing aoe projectiles that turn your camera in different direction if they hit you. It's not always that bad, but it was not a one time issue. Oh and elites are just normal monsters with bigger models and A SHIT-TON of hp and some status effect. Like armored which gives them even more hp, good luck kicking it to death if RNGJesus doesn't give you any ammo or health pickups. Some enemies (a lot actually) blow up on death so close combat becomes very dangerous later on. Sometimes an elite is an exploding monster which has elemental status which makes his explosion even stronger and one shot you with full health.
To make things even worse, this already bloated game starts prolonging itself even more. In the first levels to finish it you need only to reach a teleporter. Later the game introduces color keys to open doors. Later it introduces the explosives to blow up the walls to find the keys. Later — the batteries to insert into slots to open the doors to get the explosives to blow up the wall to get the key. Later the crystals you need to feed to a half-life looking barncale to get the battery… you get the deal. Usually all that in different parts of the level so I hope you like backtracking the empty minecraft looking rooms.
The upgrades are also for some reason done in the form of mini-games. The first one is mario platformer, the second is pokemon and the third a horizontal shmup. Thank God you can disable them in the options.
The sad thing is when it works it works good. For example, I really liked the arenas, which are non story side levels with waves of enemies, because the core gunplay is just good. But everything else ranges from mediocre to sometimes straight bad, imo.
