Fun little co-op shooter, and one i've played quite a bit over the past year. The visual style is neat and unique, soundtrack is good and fitting even if mostly not my thing, most guns feel different and even the same gun can feel different depending on the build, a lot of the builds make guns feel great to run but not all. And a randomized skin system to boot, gives you some cosmetics you can either encounter through normal gameplay or specifically farm for. I will go into a bit more detail with some poorly formatted thoughts i have, there are things both good, bad or neither to say..
Progression and weapons. I started the game last year so i don't remember this perfectly and while it might've gotten somewhat better with past updates, such as the case with rotating upgrades that now can be done earlier, but as a new player progression (that of weapons, mainly) felt really off and sometimes like a slog, even. Unless you played on low difficulties constantly, a few guns didn't really seem viable to run until you get a good build going and something like trident didn't get actually good even with all the upgrades. I played GSC pretty much exclusively early game, as it actually has AoE capabilities even without much upgrades or coherent build... We got one playable build for DMLR and SL each now, and with cycler and flinger we now have a bunch of weapons you eventually complete only a single fun build for. Yes, flinger just got an exotic but it never feels great to run something that isn't either huge single-target damage or decent AoE and while it tries to be the former, i don't think it succeeds or idk maybe i'm just building it wrong. Then you have glob that oneshots bosses while deleting crowds and plate that is a great utility giving you decay, more ammo for other weapon through fencing and more vertical mobility through another upgrade, so plate basically never leaves the secondary weapon slot. And while op stuff is not as much of a problem in a pve game, other weapons pale in comparison as a result so hopefully other stuff will get buffs and new builds.
Co-op. There's not a lot of teamplay involved, for example in PTO people will go on their own adventures completing objectives on the other side of the map, in that mode it's not necessarily a bad thing since everything gets done quicker, though there's not much incentive to stick together in general outside of a few objectives or healing allies as Glider, which can also heal yourself. This kind of co-op gameplay is not at all imposing and mostly just chill once you get the hang of it, you don't even need to go to your dead teammates to revive them you can pretty much do that from wherever you are. There are some upgrades that involve your teammates, but i end up never equipping them seeing as i host and don't get someone instantly joining me, usually. In any case, you might want to join/host a pub or play with friends for an easier, maybe less boring experience farming upgrades, at least at first.
There should be an option to auto-solve an upgrade grid, it's interesting to do at first but after having to rearrange your builds over and over again it just gets in the way of wanting to experiment with builds more, so after a while it's just annoying and unnecessarily restrictive, i'm not here for the puzzle game anyway so consider adding auto-solving, i don't want to waste any more time trying to fit in another upgrade.
Roguelike mode. It's meh, you start out very weak on harder difficulties and it's noticeable when it takes minutes to kill abominations and a single sneeze in your direction forces you to hide and wait for hp to regen. Combined with navigating some of the rooms - game just plays better when you're in an open space, like most of normal gameplay - it is pretty maddening. You get exponentially more powerful while your enemies get some flat buffs to damage an hp, it can be fun to be broken op but only for so long. If you want to get oddities it's the only place to get realistically get them, and upgrades with other classes' patterns you can only get here so if you want them you will have to farm here.
Enemy variety. We now have enemy visual variety, nice. But the actual enemy types could use some new ones, we have abominations with different weapons and a devastator, and then smaller fodder enemies. Adding some kind of flying boss enemy would be the easy suggestion, since the levels are, again, mostly open space. But maybe also something more imaginative, to keep the gameplay from getting stale, as after a while the futuristic lawnmower simulator can get a bit repetitive.
Some control over what skin modifiers you get could be nice, i mean i don't think i need another Factory (Shifted) most of which end up scrapped, and the same can be said about inferior upgrades which you should be able to auto-scrap.
Performance is good which should be expected with my specs but with a lot of enemies, such as in PTO with escalation, comes a noticeable loss of performance, also expectedly. I had a few weird crashes when using shocklance, but that's about it.
Also have i mentioned Glider's majestic rear, waow is it enormous.
In conclusion it's a good game with its fair share of oversights or just odd design choices, i had a lot of fun for what i paid. It is reasonably cheap and constantly on sale but whether it is worth your money or not i can't tell so watch some gameplay footage or reviews and decide for yourself or just go for it i guess, this can't be the worst impulsive purchase. I give it 10 Factory (Shifted) out of 1 Oddity obtained in normal missions so far.
