Probably the best designed game I've ever played. The developers know what makes the game fun, and stayed true to that. There are some minor nitpicks I'll mention below, but for the most part, every moment spent in the game will be enjoyable, with only rare cases of grind or frustration.
[h2]Awesome Design[/h2]
The game wants you to have fun. The classes are clear roles you can fill and you just know how to be effective because that's what those classes are good at. The engineer is good at single target and taking out stragglers, the driller is insane at crowd control, the scout is fast and good at taking out high value targets, and the gunner can singlehandedly bring the team back to life or prevent them going down, as well as having high sustained single target damage and even some burst damage. You know what role of the team to fill because your tools work well for that thing. You don't need to even communicate. I mean, probably 70% of my games, the only communication we've had is "look at this" and "rock and stone" and "ready". That's how good the teamwork is, and it's all automatic. You don't need to be someone who is good at teamwork. It's so well designed, that someone who played nothing but sniper in battlefield and camped would be a good teammate in this game.
[h2]Genius Design Choices[/h2]
If you die, you still get some of the rewards you got through the mission, and can be revived in most cases. There is no punishing the player like in many games. You just about never think "that was unfair" even when 3 bulk detonators show up while in uplink. Plus, difficulty is optional, you can just choose a lower difficulty and it only marginally affects rewards. Each weapon feels good (apart from the minigun and smart gun which are garbage) and satisfying to use. The world immerses you with atmosphere and giving you a near-sandbox level of freedom to do random stuff. You could for example just dig straight through the wall instead of going through the normal passages, or draw the enemy back into a more open area or a chokepoint. You could stay together, or have people split for some objectives like finding resonance crystals, and the game doesn't punish you for it. Overall, the game's design is not "opinionated". There is no "correct" way to have fun. They give you the field and the toys to play with, they don't say "nuh uh you're not allowed to do that". It's a breath of fresh air from all the "hey you failed so I'm going to take all the things you like about the game and everything you find enjoyable about it and destroy it" that you see in e.g. games that add "roguelike" mechanics despite having no damn clue what makes them work.
[h2]Criticisms[/h2]
There is a ton of RNG and grind you have to do if you want specific (or all) weapon overclocks. It took me around 450 hours to unlock every weapon overclock I wanted to use, and that's working somewhat "efficiently" and minmaxing. In fact, the last one I considered "good" was one of the last 5 or so I got, so I really did have to unlock absolutely everything in order to get the ones I wanted. This doesn't [i]feel[/i] like that much of a grind because the game itself is fun and you don't absolutely need it, but bear in mind that if you want to experience everything, it will take ~400 hours.
It's somewhat fun singleplayer, but really it's a multiplayer game. The community and cooperaction is about 70% of the game. That's not the fault of the game really so much as just "it's that type of game", much like Insurgency is just that type of game.
It does have a bit of that disease of "you're going to play every day... right? Right..?" in that there are weekly mission objectives (mostly for cores for overclocks) and limits to what you can achieve daily. Along with that, it has some time locked things. For example, I'd love to get the horse mask, but can't until a specific time of year, and I'm not even sure if I can then. This is good and bad. It gives a reason to keep playing aside from just the fun of playing, but why do you need that? And it's also just kind of FOMO.
The amount of actually useful weapon builds is low. For the most part people won't care if you use non-meta builds, but it's pretty obvious there's like, one, maybe two builds per class that are actually "canon" and the rest are just for the sake of variety. For example, no one is going to use flamer + face melter with wave cooker + gamma contamination. That's just not a viable build. Basically, there are good builds, and only a few of them, and then there are tons of useless things no one has a reason to use. Those builds are still really fun, but it is obvious the other overclocks and perks are just to pad it out.
