I stuck it out the whole way this time and wish I hadn't.
And incredibly interesting premise and lovely looking game that's so full of small baffling design decisions it just breaks the whole thing apart.

It's a Shmup Metroidvania Deckbuilder. Except it's a bad at all of those things.

As a Shmup, your character has a huge hitbox and there's often so many particles on screen there's no way you can dodge them, so you have to rely heavily on bullet clearing cards. Even when you see the bullets coming, you'll often clip one because of your massive hit box.

As a 'vania, it's mostly linear with some very tedious backtracking on account of your slow movement speed. Most of the exploration mechanics you get are used a handful of times and don't really round out your arsenal.

As a deckbuilder, it could have improved the shmup combat, but in practice you get SO many bad cards that there's not much point in exploring. The fact that the cards are randomly assigned to buttons means you're usually best to just spam them.

Enemies are bullet sponges with bullet patterns that often punish dodging (again, pushing you toward bullet clearing spells).

All armor is temporary, except one broke-as-hell late game card that lets you restore a heart.

The writing is groan inducing and reads like a dream conversation with all your pals (and you cannot skip it).

Checkpoints are often terrible.

Difficulty spikes are often.

There's a bad submarine section, which is not as bad as a lot of people seem to make out.

I was so up for this game, and I feel like it's not a million miles away from being good! Building a good deck (eventually) feels great!

But the execution is not there and I couldn't recommend it to anyone.

An absolutely incredible combat system that is undercut by all the story stuff at every turn.
The tone wildly veers and the jokes are often the most embarrassing shit.
Just make him an angry man who must rip & tear.

Combat:
The ballet between flamethrower, grenade, shoot, glory kill, chainsaw is just incredible and anyone who complains about the low ammo count is bad at the game.

The last boss is dreadful.

I always remember hearing that Doom 3 was the black sheep of the family, and was more of a horror game than the rest. This really only holds true for the beginning portion of the game, and the rest of it was way more Doom like than I expected!
You just have to approach it with the mind of the Doomslayer.

My only real complaints are that the AI totally sucks, and will frequently spawn directly in your face to die immediately to a shotgun, and that all of the imp "Jump scares" are really annoying.

The weapons do feel lame at the start, but by the time you're in the midst of later combat, you totally forget about it.

The shotgun is also nowhere near as bad as everyone says, and it totally serves its purpose of making you run up to the enemies to kill them.

A totally fine shooter that doesn't really do anything that made the first one good.
The level design very rarely creates exciting encounters, the enemies don't feel "smart" any more.
The melee moves very rarely have a chance to shine.
The story, and particularly the ending, are dreadful.
It's decidedly not scary at any point.

But, for the most part, shooting stuff is fun.

Ach, man. What a disappointment in the end.
The combat is almost good, but every fight is the same loop and I'm either taking 0 damage or dying in one hit.
The world and all the wee side stories are so cool and the story is so interesting but just comes to a "this is it for now, buy the DLC" ending.
The game is really bloated by bad sidequests, which I recommend skipping, and a weird need to be a metroidvania... and that DREADFUL map.

I really wanted to love this.

Space poverty sim.

A big clunky mech game with loads of mechs and loads of customisation. It's a great time with friends. Walking around, strategising, bursting down big bad mechs.

On your own it is MUCH worse. The teammate AI is insanely bad... like, surprisingly so.
They'll frequently stand around and not shoot anything. They'll constantly walk in front of you (there is friendly fire).
Sometimes you'll ask all three of them to just please deal with one teeny tiny mech while you fight off 4 or 5 big motherfuckers and, after you emerge victorious with an arm, a leg and a hundred thousand dollars worth of guns missing you'll turn around and your teammates will have maybe shot the last enemies leg off.

Anyway, great with friends.

Ach, I mean. It's like almost good.
A surprisingly finnicky character controller that you spend way more time fighting with over tiny jumps left and right than you do enjoying it doing big swings. Loads of little things just don't feel right.

Some awful checkpointing in what I played. Sometimes you'd get launched through a barrier that you couldn't go back through, immediately hitting a checkpoint meaning you have to start the level over if you happen to have missed any collectibles. Later on it swings the other way and you'll be doing a big detour to collect some stuff, before dying to a silly bit of platforming, making you do the easy detour over and over.

The music is nice and funky, but the loops feel like they're about a minute long and are repeated for every stage of the world you're in, driving you to totally insanity by the second stage.

There's fun stuff in here, and it feels well crafted, so I feel bad about not liking it... but boy did I not like it.