Weak combat mechanics and repetitive level design bogged down even further by looter-shooter grinding mechanics.
If you start Commander (the highest default difficulty) vanilla, you will sit there and hack away at the early bosses for five minutes straight just doing the same combo dozens of times to remove a couple pixels from the health bar at a time. So then you grind and do all the looter shooter bullshit like leveling up a million different stats (for every character no less), farming weapons, grinding weapon upgrades, grinding TECH upgrades, and also farming consumable items. Now, after all that grinding, you can basically one-shot everything everything in the game while also having endless consumables that you can spam to double damage output, halve damage taken, revive you upon death, or restore your energy.
The actual combat consists of lock-on ranged attacks as well as spamming either parry into basic combo or vehicle rush attack into basic combo, with generous timing windows and near-constant i-frame uptime. Even the SS-ranks never require anything more than this as they don't cap points from repeatedly spamming moves.
It's probably the most unbalanced game I've ever seen. Really poor design for an action game, and the looter-shooter mechanics are just compensating for the extremely simplistic combat system and uninspired bossfights. Because the actual design and mechanics aren't interesting or well designed enough to actually encourage replay value (like an arcade game would for example), they resort to meta systems of mindless skinner-box grinding.
If you start Commander (the highest default difficulty) vanilla, you will sit there and hack away at the early bosses for five minutes straight just doing the same combo dozens of times to remove a couple pixels from the health bar at a time. So then you grind and do all the looter shooter bullshit like leveling up a million different stats (for every character no less), farming weapons, grinding weapon upgrades, grinding TECH upgrades, and also farming consumable items. Now, after all that grinding, you can basically one-shot everything everything in the game while also having endless consumables that you can spam to double damage output, halve damage taken, revive you upon death, or restore your energy.
The actual combat consists of lock-on ranged attacks as well as spamming either parry into basic combo or vehicle rush attack into basic combo, with generous timing windows and near-constant i-frame uptime. Even the SS-ranks never require anything more than this as they don't cap points from repeatedly spamming moves.
It's probably the most unbalanced game I've ever seen. Really poor design for an action game, and the looter-shooter mechanics are just compensating for the extremely simplistic combat system and uninspired bossfights. Because the actual design and mechanics aren't interesting or well designed enough to actually encourage replay value (like an arcade game would for example), they resort to meta systems of mindless skinner-box grinding.