The single best horde action game out there, made even better with friends.
The best thing to know about this game going in is it's about mastery. There are other modes, but by far the focus is on its main mode: playing missions on higher and higher difficulties, getting good enough to handle whatever is thrown at you, and chasing the incredible high of clutching at the peak of chaos.
The game doesn't do a great job of preparing you for the near infinite skill ceiling you face: early difficulties can feel hard if you're not familiar with the horde shooter genre, and the game's melee focus may challenge players even then. Teamplay is incredibly important as you progress, and getting your character to level 30 is fun, but it's only the start - and that's a great thing, as there's a deep well of decisions to work from once you hit it.
You've got a lot of choice in the way of customisation and fine tuning. Classes play notably both between each other and between differing builds. The weapons and blessing you pick make a world of difference, and striving to find the best way to make a weapon you like work well is deeply satisfying once it all clicks. Each class has three diverging talent paths you can generally pick and choose from to rework your build, with a ton of weapon choices. Each weapon has 20 levels of mastery earned from using them in missions, the levelling of which allows you to unlock various blessings to amend your weapon's traits, unlock different versions of the base weapon, and improve its power.
The weapon upgrade system is somewhat confusing: as you level up your mastery, you put points into unlocking and upgrading blessings you can then add to a weapon, which you can raise from a basic grey profane level with no additional improvements to a transcendent weapon with two blessings and two refinements. The blessings you can choose are purely what you've put your points into from levelling up the weapon. No weapon can be perfect; each weapon's stats can go up to 80/80, with one stat out of those reaching only 60/80, or having that 20 point deficit spread across multiple stats. Players typically identify what stat they want to "dump", then buy the weapon with the in game currency until one with the right maximum stats appear, to upgrade it to the maximum strength and apply the blessings they want. Weekly contracts assigning given tasks (collect a resource, complete 8 missions, kill 1000 of a group of enemy) help provide a currency that allow you to quickly pick up a good weapon to work with, either to try out, level up with or to use as best fit - minor star distribution differences won't matter much until the hardest difficulties the game has to throw at you in Havoc mode.
Another major boon is the developer's positivity towards mods. Don't like an element of the UI? Look up mods, there'll be a way to change it. Where the devs can be slow to add QoL, the Modders have you covered.
It's an absolute blast of a game, and a joy to feel yourself improving at. Give it a try, know the difficulty you start with is nothing like what you're going to face eventually, and you'll fall in love in no time.
