I don't entirely want to write this because there is potential here, the writing of the series is great, the setting is great, the art is great, the music is great, but the gameplay itself is a slog.
Do not buy this unless you are *genuinely* willing to play a version of this game that is grating at every step, it is actively worse than the free demo. Quality of loot has been *SIGNIFICANTLY* reduced while enemy numbers, accuracy, and aggression have been tuned up, so expect to be mag-dumping your weapon that either does so little damage it requires a mag to kill or has such poor accuracy that unless you're crouching and within twenty feet of them it'll miss half it's shots, and you then have to repeat that until a dozen enemies have rushed toward you and expect to be rerunning missions in the hopes that something better than a starter pistol or the basic shotgun you got immediately during the demo *might* drop.
There was some expectation that QoL changes would be made from the demo to early access and that really hasn't been the case. Vendors still exist largely in weird states, requiring you to traverse levels just to look at what they have (much of which is missing descriptions so if you don't remember what these items are from using them in the demo, you'll have to buy them just to learn what they even are, what ammo they use, so on and so forth. ) or clear out every enemy from a level just to find out they sell garbage.
The UI has not improved at all, there seem to be just as many place holders as the demo, many of the weapons and items in it are still just MS Paint text, and the descriptions on so many things aren't written either so you'll get very little info on what you're picking up.
There's also no brightness setting at all, for someone like me with a monitor that is fairly dark by default and has no on-board controls to adjust brightness, I always have to rely on games to make things more visible, that's not an option here which means the early levels are genuinely unpleasant to go through as even with the flashlight much of the levels were barely visible.
Spawns have not improved, there were at least two separate missions where I had a map I thought was cleared only to suddenly have a dozen armored cops literally pop up from off screen and instantly zero my health. Things are harder but not in a way that feels like it's fair and that exposes the jank significantly more than the demo did, it's done in a way that you'll play through a dozen levels only to have your best gun be the same one you started with and now you're fighting enemies that even if you loot the automatic off of one you mag dumped at point blank their accuracy is better than yours and they have armor that lets them tank nine hits while their buddies run up to beat the snot out of you because moving, shooting, and having shots land is something they're allowed to do but not you.
There will be random insane difficulty spikes and no indications that they're coming, expect to enter a level that feels like a joke where you can get through with little effort using a crummy little pistol only to then have every cop on the planet suddenly barreling down on you in the next one with no indication as to when it will end.
There is no real sense of progression as levels don't have consistent difficulty or drops, and what little info you get from descriptions all basically tell you the same thing, whatever is coming is going to be rough, but when every single level indicates that and half of them are a slog that is at least doable with the low quality loot, the other half are instant annihilation by automatics at the edge of your screen that you had no chance of doing anything about unless you got lucky and looted anything that isn't at best an MP5 knockoff that at the best of times knocks over the cops and proceeds to make it harder for you to hit them as a result.
The game does an incredibly poor job of explaining its intentions and how to navigate the jank and poor progression because it doesn't explain anything. You are expected to treat this as an extraction shooter, except you will have zero idea of whether a level is high difficulty, if it can even have decent rewards, or when you should try to progress. If you went from the previous game to this one you would probably be completely and entirely lost at how it went from fully linear progression of missions in its campaign always giving you exactly appropriate tools and freeform unlocks for its contract mode, to absolutely confused at a campaign that is quite literally starting with you having to throw rocks at people and ending with your best weapon most likely being a pistol that drops off of regular cops in the demo, and then the more free form mode where you never have any idea if you're appropriately geared, nor do you even have any clue what progression looks like. For example, the demo had alternate suits to help you survive since the starter suit allows you to survive at best the weakest enemies in the game armed with .22 long rifle pieces of junk they can barely operate, this version does not make it clear whether any better suits even exist or when you'll get them, and the level that made me decide to stop playing was one in which it felt like I should have had one as armored cops that ate half the mag of the knockoff MP5 proceeded to come at me for seven minutes without any indication as to whether I needed to just be evading them and focusing on time or if there was some amount of them I needed to kill, but it ultimately didn't matter because I hadn't managed to get ahold of a weapon that could deal with a dozen of them visibly spawning at a corner.
The demo had some polish to it, and could even be pretty fun at times which may have given the idea that this would be an improvement as it had more time to cook and presumably more features / content, this is VERY MUCH early access and is NOT GOOD. Absolutely DO NOT get it unless you are willing to deal with unrewarding grinding through unbalanced jank. There is a long road to go before this game becomes worth it for anyone other than the most hardcore of Brigador universe fans willing to endure the difficulty spikes, lopsided progression, and absolutely confounding design decisions like forcing you to play through a specific level every time you want to move through the two major areas in the game.
