For what it is and this pricepoint, it's really good.
Technically and thematically a fun retro shooter. The guns feel varied and fun, same for the enemies. What I didn't know when buying this game though is that it's an arena shooter. Every level has multiple arenas that you get locked into and have to defeat waves of spawning enemies. It's pretty annoying to have cleared out an area with good cover just to have waves of enemies spawn right on top of you. Every level is like this - explore, get locked into an arena, clear it out, explore, locked into the next arena etc. Some people probably don't mind this, it's just not what I was expecting.
Not the best in the genre that I've played, but I still had fun - the nightmares make this game stand apart from others in this genre. I beat it on maximum difficulty and unlocked everything I could. I didn't use a guide until the very end. I played for 140 hours and only had one crash that whole time until I got into the post-game dungeon, which seemed to have some bugs that once figured out, let me minimize the damage of a crash. One of the GOG achievements bugged out for me as well. The characters are interesting and all have their own quirks - which you learn to understand why they're there. Yes there is fan service in the game - which I think for most people interested in this game is a pro. The most egregious of this - the "purging (rubbing)" mini-game, can be mostly skipped if you so wish. The story isn't ground breaking, but kept my interest with a few twists and turns. There is potential for interesting combat because of multiple layers of complexity. It fails though because I wasn't required to engage and use them all to my advantage to win most of my fights. The principle of these having to deal with corruption and blood splatters. The game provides choices to combat, but they're not all necessary. The game didn't make it clear which jobs/moves were better than others through stats etc. I had to manually go out and try them to figure it out. Once I found a winning team setup and strategy, I was able to take the same approach to every single fight in the game and win with no problems. The dungeons are big, with decent diversity and puzzles. You're often rewarded with generic and not very useful loot for your efforts though. Where the game excels, is the nightmare battles. There's a boss that wanders each dungeon and at first is unkillable. You can wound and run away, but you can't see your mini-map, it gets really dark, and I genuinely felt a degree of anxiety during these events. Definitely worth picking up on sale.
I can't recommend buying this game as the developers are attacking the livelihood of youtubers (Felix Kjellberg AKA Pewdiepie) who they have deemed to be racist for saying a racial slur on stream (not even streaming firewatch at the time) by filing DMC claims against them and encouraging others to as well. As if racial slurs aren't common place in competitive gaming and various forms of music. They have also been banning and censoring people on their various forums for discussing this issue as well. I refuse to support this behaviour from game developers and I strongly encourage you to as well.
