An unmemorable world, story and characters plagued with one liners placed into a game full of QoL, well thought mechanics and a co-op that makes the game quite enjoyable to play, but a chore to pay attention and dig in when it comes to the narrative.
The developers of this game do play a lot of games and truly understand how third person shooters and souls like behave and what feel like, and they nailed it! But the world is uninteresting and randomized so if you're here on the story, keep your expectations very low.
The gunplay, guns (and rpg aspects) with souls-like elements feels very well polished. The equipment and mods are always interesting and a joy to find even if you're not gonna use them. Levelling up is a way to get skill points guaranteed, but you can also find them laying around as random loot and I really love this because it completely removed the FOMO that I get in RPGs when levelling up. Almost no trait feels useless as almost all of them are designed for.. well.. weapons! The only exception can be melee builds because they're kind of hard to do due to rng but still. Even the weakest traits made me feel like they were worth looting, as they have a base effect just by adquiring them with no limit whatsoever on how many you can have.
Weapons/Guns are also very cool-- if you're not into automatic weapons. Almost all of them are single shot reload, shotguns, pistols/revolvers and while there are automatic weapons, they are usually quite bad and rare. Due to how the game is design, I don't see this as a bad thing, but I do recommend people to keep this in mind when trying to play the game.
Conclusion on the gunplay, guns and RPG aspects: Excellent, really well polished and thought.
Bosses and enemies are interesting and fun to play against once you accept that they will spawn mobs. Don't see them as annoying; see them as resources for your mods to load faster.
Some bosses have alternate kills that go from straight up dismemberment to don't fight at all by doing a puzzle. Each kill with different rewards that are tied to the method you used and I find that really cool.
Conclusion on the bosses and enemy design; Good and interesting, always fresh.
Co-Op and Scaling can be played in every mode (Campaign, Adventure and Survival) from beggining to end. (atleast with two players) feels incredibly great. You don't feel overpowered and the scaling doesn't feel rough at all, specially if you both coordinate and try to keep the gear score at the same level (aka everything upgraded at the same level as the other players due to the scaling of the enemies being tied to weapons, while the world and loot tied to everything. For more info click here).
The game features friendly fire that CANNOT be turned off and I'm glad. The friendly fire really makes you think before using your weapons and coordinating with others to advance while crouched/get out of the way because a sniper is behind you and you're a close quarter shotgun playstyle or because you have an AoE attack that doesn't distinguishes friend from foe that can literally instakill your friend if the enemy decides to jump. It's fun.
Conclusion on the Co-Op and Scaling aspects of the game: Great, incredibly well pulled off, to the point where I feel like you would make yourself a disservice by playing solo.
The random elements of loot, npcs and level design are something that I found really enjoyable and fun to replay, because this game has a feature called "reroll" that allows you to re-play a biome or "world" with another seed, separate of your progress in the main campaign and I find that extremely cool for people like I that suffer from fomo and dont really want to replay an 11 to 20 hour game from scratch just to get some achievements that didn't spawn due to RNG. I found it really interesting to "reroll" biomes to see what other cool stuff you can get like.. hell, you usually get like 3 bosses per world but rerolling I found like at least 12 extra ones in the first world alone and when playing an extra mode, when I thought I had everything, there was more?? so that was really fun but at the same time worrying because you can get really nasty bosses in your campaign seed.
Conclusion on the RNG aspects of the game; Good but annoying when trying to get achievements or something specific due to the obvious nature of RNG
The story is told.. very badly. The lore scattered is way too much, doesn't help to bring context and it's all scattered in logs that take.. no kidding, 4 to 6 minutes of reading and this wouldn't really be a problem if the logs were.. different? but you don't really know names, you don't get to know anyone, and when a character is presented as very important, they don't have lines like.. at all after you meet them.
The main story doesn't really say anything, forcing you to read the extra lore logs that don't add much to the story either, and I feel like the entire story can be summed up in a single minute video due to how little happens pretty much everywhere.
Some other nitpicks that I don't know where to fit in this story paragraph: Only one player can read logs at a time so unless you're into narrating like a child's book to your friends on vc or they are afk for more than 6 minutes, reading logs is not advised. The voice acting is incredibly hit or miss that ranges from the best thing you've heard to "are they just reading a paper?"
Conclusion on the narrative and storytelling; Between Bad and Average. Forgettable
Overall this game is a four out of five stars. No more, no less, no regrets nor feeling like it should be more or less. It's a really good game but due to how uninteresting the story can be, you're gonna be playing it for the gunplay alone.
TL;DR - Don't treat this game seriously. Play this with friends and shoot while talking to eachother. That's the best way to play this game.
The developers of this game do play a lot of games and truly understand how third person shooters and souls like behave and what feel like, and they nailed it! But the world is uninteresting and randomized so if you're here on the story, keep your expectations very low.
The gunplay, guns (and rpg aspects) with souls-like elements feels very well polished. The equipment and mods are always interesting and a joy to find even if you're not gonna use them. Levelling up is a way to get skill points guaranteed, but you can also find them laying around as random loot and I really love this because it completely removed the FOMO that I get in RPGs when levelling up. Almost no trait feels useless as almost all of them are designed for.. well.. weapons! The only exception can be melee builds because they're kind of hard to do due to rng but still. Even the weakest traits made me feel like they were worth looting, as they have a base effect just by adquiring them with no limit whatsoever on how many you can have.
Weapons/Guns are also very cool-- if you're not into automatic weapons. Almost all of them are single shot reload, shotguns, pistols/revolvers and while there are automatic weapons, they are usually quite bad and rare. Due to how the game is design, I don't see this as a bad thing, but I do recommend people to keep this in mind when trying to play the game.
Conclusion on the gunplay, guns and RPG aspects: Excellent, really well polished and thought.
Bosses and enemies are interesting and fun to play against once you accept that they will spawn mobs. Don't see them as annoying; see them as resources for your mods to load faster.
Some bosses have alternate kills that go from straight up dismemberment to don't fight at all by doing a puzzle. Each kill with different rewards that are tied to the method you used and I find that really cool.
Conclusion on the bosses and enemy design; Good and interesting, always fresh.
Co-Op and Scaling can be played in every mode (Campaign, Adventure and Survival) from beggining to end. (atleast with two players) feels incredibly great. You don't feel overpowered and the scaling doesn't feel rough at all, specially if you both coordinate and try to keep the gear score at the same level (aka everything upgraded at the same level as the other players due to the scaling of the enemies being tied to weapons, while the world and loot tied to everything. For more info click here).
The game features friendly fire that CANNOT be turned off and I'm glad. The friendly fire really makes you think before using your weapons and coordinating with others to advance while crouched/get out of the way because a sniper is behind you and you're a close quarter shotgun playstyle or because you have an AoE attack that doesn't distinguishes friend from foe that can literally instakill your friend if the enemy decides to jump. It's fun.
Conclusion on the Co-Op and Scaling aspects of the game: Great, incredibly well pulled off, to the point where I feel like you would make yourself a disservice by playing solo.
The random elements of loot, npcs and level design are something that I found really enjoyable and fun to replay, because this game has a feature called "reroll" that allows you to re-play a biome or "world" with another seed, separate of your progress in the main campaign and I find that extremely cool for people like I that suffer from fomo and dont really want to replay an 11 to 20 hour game from scratch just to get some achievements that didn't spawn due to RNG. I found it really interesting to "reroll" biomes to see what other cool stuff you can get like.. hell, you usually get like 3 bosses per world but rerolling I found like at least 12 extra ones in the first world alone and when playing an extra mode, when I thought I had everything, there was more?? so that was really fun but at the same time worrying because you can get really nasty bosses in your campaign seed.
Conclusion on the RNG aspects of the game; Good but annoying when trying to get achievements or something specific due to the obvious nature of RNG
The story is told.. very badly. The lore scattered is way too much, doesn't help to bring context and it's all scattered in logs that take.. no kidding, 4 to 6 minutes of reading and this wouldn't really be a problem if the logs were.. different? but you don't really know names, you don't get to know anyone, and when a character is presented as very important, they don't have lines like.. at all after you meet them.
The main story doesn't really say anything, forcing you to read the extra lore logs that don't add much to the story either, and I feel like the entire story can be summed up in a single minute video due to how little happens pretty much everywhere.
Some other nitpicks that I don't know where to fit in this story paragraph: Only one player can read logs at a time so unless you're into narrating like a child's book to your friends on vc or they are afk for more than 6 minutes, reading logs is not advised. The voice acting is incredibly hit or miss that ranges from the best thing you've heard to "are they just reading a paper?"
Conclusion on the narrative and storytelling; Between Bad and Average. Forgettable
Overall this game is a four out of five stars. No more, no less, no regrets nor feeling like it should be more or less. It's a really good game but due to how uninteresting the story can be, you're gonna be playing it for the gunplay alone.
TL;DR - Don't treat this game seriously. Play this with friends and shoot while talking to eachother. That's the best way to play this game.