Played a little under an hour, so far it's... okay. I maybe had my expectations set too high, or I had it combined with Titanfall 2 in my mind, but I was expecting something a little more fun and inventive. The first half hour or so is mostly cheesy meatheaded cutscenes, QTEs and tutorial stuff. It's all really bland and feels like it was written by a 14 year old who plays a lot of Gears Of War and Duke Nukem Forever. It looks fine, but the art direction isn't particularly imaginative either, Gears Of War but with some Rage thrown in. I got to the start of the gameplay and while it's got some fun mechanics (the kick, the lasso, the points for kill types) it all feels really loose, like I'm just mashing my way through it. It doesn't have that feeling of precision tactics that Doom (93 and 16), Juarez Gunslinger or Shadow Warrior do. Maybe it's not supposed to and I should be barrelling through having fun killing people in different ways. The only problem is that that's getting a little stale already - you can only whip and kick someone to death so many times before it gets dull. It feels a little like I'm playing a single-player campaign that was only really designed to teach me how to play a multiplayer game or a wave shooter or something. Hopefully I'm still in the opening stages and it'll get more involved as I go.
I've now played for a few more hours. It might be because I'm coming from the fairly rubbish and po-faced Crysis 3, but I felt a lot more positive about this game as I went on. The settings get a lot more attractive - sci-fi cities and big double moons and the like - and lots of fun setpieces like getting chased by a gigantic threshing wheel thing or dropping a train on an angry dragon beast (though I had to drop the difficulty down to very easy for the former - why do devs always make turret sections insanely hard?). And most of the team have fucked off so there's less meathead marine swearing and grunting to put up with. Now I've unlocked some weapons and alt-fire modes and stuff, the combat has livened up a bit too, though it can still feel a little loose and a little repetitive. I'd really like a slo-mo power-up to get in some nice trick shots. Also, I understand the thinking behind it - to encourage players to have fun - but having checklists of complicated ways to kill enemies in order to unlock stuff can make doing stuff like killing punk-thugs by kicking them into cacti feel like grinding.
Okay, finished. The story and writing continued to be painfully bad - the most generic stuff possible covered with rude words masquerading as jokes or bigotry masquerading as characterisation. Apparently they were inspired by Firefly but they must not have actually watched the show if this is what they ended up with. And they have the gall to end it on a cliffhanger.
Otherwise, when it's fun and pretty, it's really fun and pretty, but there were too many bullet-sponge mini-bosses and interminable boss fights and zombies and what have you, and not enough variety of locations (turns out the partially-collapsed leisure mega-complex one is basically the only exterior you get, and while it looks nice, seeing it yet again after another section of corridors isn't really enough), for it to sustain that for any period of time. Probably the most irritating thing was that you are only allowed to hold three weapons at a time, and you can only swap them out when you come across an in-world terminal - the whole game is based around finding fun ways to kill enemies, why would they restrain the player like that? Even more frustrating is that when you finish the campaign they unlock the ability to hold all your weapons at once on a replay. Let me do that the first time, you idiots!
Rating: can be fun, but often held back by irritating design and bad writing
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