- Exceptional core gameplay experience
- Outstanding co-op multiplayer for four players
- Unique and immersive atmosphere with strong visuals
- Poor optimization and severe performance issues
- Frequent crashes, freezes, and game-breaking bugs
- Developer neglect and worsening issues over time
Emotions
The primary causes of frustration stem from severe technical issues, including frequent crashes, GPU hardlocks, and persistent performance problems despite high-end hardware. Players also cite poor game design choices, such as unfair difficulty spikes, excessive grinding, and balancing decisions that nerf enjoyable gameplay elements, alongside a lack of developer transparency and slow fixes for critical bugs.
Disappointment arises from the game's unfulfilled potential, with players noting a decline in quality due to persistent technical issues, poor design choices, and lack of meaningful content updates. Many feel the developers have neglected core problems, broken promises, and prioritized monetization or new content over fixing long-standing bugs and performance issues, leading to a loss of trust and enjoyment.
Anger is directed at developers for perceived neglect, dishonesty, and poor decision-making, such as ignoring player feedback, introducing unbalanced or untested content, and failing to address critical bugs. Players also express frustration over hardware risks, unfair difficulty changes, and developers' apparent contempt for the community, including censorship of criticism and prioritization of monetization over gameplay integrity.
Excitement is driven by the game's fast-paced, chaotic, and immersive gameplay, including explosive combat, cooperative mechanics, and cinematic moments. Players highlight the adrenaline rush, engaging community events, and the introduction of new content like caves and flying enemies as key sources of thrill and enjoyment.
Amusement stems from the game's satirical tone, humorous bugs, and chaotic multiplayer moments, such as friendly fire incidents, absurd deaths, and the game's over-the-top setting. Players often laugh at the jankiness and unpredictability, accepting it as part of the game's charm.
Verdict
Mostly negative
Summary
Positive 25% · Negative 75%. Score: 75 / 100
Positives:
- Players consistently praise the game's engaging, chaotic, and immersive gameplay loop, highlighting its fun, fluid, and satisfying mechanics. The core experience is frequently described as one of the best in its genre, with high replayability and strong solo/team dynamics.
- The game excels as a cooperative experience, with players emphasizing its fun, chaotic, and rewarding team-based gameplay. The social aspect, including seamless matchmaking and positive community interactions, significantly enhances enjoyment, especially with friends or random players.
- The game's satirical lore, rich worldbuilding, and immersive atmosphere (e.g., memorable moments, friendly fire mechanics) create a one-of-a-kind experience. Players appreciate the humor, storytelling, and player-driven narrative elements.
- Many players express fondness for the game's early days, citing strong initial impressions, fun launch experiences, and nostalgia for its potential. However, this sentiment is tempered by later technical issues or shifts in perception.
- The development team is highly praised for actively engaging with the community, addressing feedback, and rapidly fixing bugs. Their transparency and passion for the game foster trust and optimism among players.
Negatives:
- Performance issues include FPS drops, stuttering, memory leaks, and inconsistent frame rates, even on high-end hardware. The game struggles to maintain playable performance, especially at higher difficulties or resolutions.
- The game frequently causes full system crashes, freezes, and hard locks requiring PC restarts. These issues affect players regardless of hardware specs and often result in hardware damage risks (e.g., GPU/CPU overheating, SSD corruption).
- Developers frequently ignore player feedback, prioritize new content over fixes, and provide minimal transparency. Broken promises, delayed patches, and lack of accountability erode trust in the dev team.
- Numerous bugs disrupt gameplay, including mission softlocks, enemy spawning issues, physics glitches (e.g., ragdolls, invisible enemies), and objective failures. Some bugs render missions unplayable or force players to restart.
- Weapons and stratagems are frequently nerfed into uselessness or pre-nerfed on release, while enemies are buffed to compensate. Meta strategies dominate due to poor balancing, limiting build diversity.
Gameplay:
- Players frequently report imbalances in weapon effectiveness, stratagem cooldowns, and meta-dependent nerfs/buffs. These issues affect tactical diversity and fairness in combat.
- Three distinct factions (Terminids, Automatons, Illuminates) introduce varied weak points, behaviors, and challenges. However, some enemies lack consistent weak points or telegraph attacks.
- A diverse arsenal (rifles, stratagems, armor passives) allows for tactical customization. However, balancing issues limit some weapons to niche roles.
- The game emphasizes teamwork with up to four players, offering chaotic but rewarding cooperative missions. Friendly fire mechanics add realism and coordination challenges.
- Difficulty levels (1-10) lack balance, with higher tiers offering minimal rewards. Repetitive objectives and time limits frustrate players seeking strategic depth.
Performance:
- Performance worsens with updates, with FPS halving (e.g., from 60 to 20-30) and stuttering increasing. Players note that optimization efforts are reactive (e.g., after review bombs) and often insufficient.
- The game's install size is bloated (up to 150GB on PC), far exceeding console versions (30GB). While recent updates reduced file size by ~85%, the initial bloat contributed to performance and storage issues.
- The game is CPU-bound, with excessive CPU usage (90-100%) and underutilized GPUs. Poor optimization leads to uneven performance, even with lowered graphics settings.
- Reports of the game causing permanent hardware damage (e.g., bricking PCs, frying GPUs/CPUs, or damaging power supplies) due to kernel-level anti-cheat, excessive resource usage, or instability. These claims are severe but less frequent.
- Bot missions suffer from game-breaking bugs (e.g., audio freezes, desync) and lag spikes, leading to mission failures or progress loss. Performance varies significantly by planet type.
Recommendations:
- A significant portion of feedback describes the game as 'unplayable' or 'too broken' due to bugs, crashes, optimization issues, and poor AI design. Players advise waiting for fixes before purchasing.
- Many players suggest waiting for performance improvements before purchasing, as the game suffers from optimization issues that affect low-to-mid-end PCs. Some plan to revisit the game after 3-6 months.
- Despite issues, the game is highly recommended for players who enjoy fast-paced, chaotic co-op gameplay with friends. Fans of teamwork and explosives praise its unique experience and replayability.
- Players criticize developers for focusing on new content instead of fixing existing issues. Many refuse to support the game financially until performance and balance problems are addressed.
- The game is best experienced with friends, as solo play lacks tutorials and support. Players advise setting matchmaking to private or playing with a group for the full experience.
Miscellaneous:
- Players frequently compare the developers unfavorably to Mojang and criticize perceived incompetence, drawing parallels to Halo's decline. This reflects frustration with game design and execution decisions.
- The kernel-level anti-cheat system in a primarily PvE game is seen as excessive and unnecessary, despite being removable. Players question the need for such aggressive measures.
- Players accuse developers of intentionally nerfing fun mechanics, describing it as a 'humiliation fetish.' This reflects strong dissatisfaction with balance changes.
- Mods frequently break after updates due to the game's console-first architecture, frustrating players who rely on mods for enhanced or customized gameplay.
- Players have conflicting views on how developers handle community feedback and narrative decisions, indicating a polarized player base.
