...shooters aren't your thing. I'm bad at shooters, so just chose the Easy difficulty (which is indeed easy, as it should be), and started playing. The story is good, and worth buying the game for it, even if you don't normally play this kind of games. On the downside(s): I'd give it five stars, but the hacking puzzles are somewhat annoying (Quite often I got screwed by the RNG, which gave me an impossible to solve layout, ALWAYS save the game before attempting a hack), and bugs. Well, one bug, but it made me stuck and I had to replay the whole segment because of it - so, a piece of spoilers-avoiding advice: Save often in Fort Frolic, preferably in separate slots, so, if the bug occurs, you can just reload and don't have to go back to an autosave and redo the whole location.
The things DLC adds, were more frustrating than fun for me, scaling poorly with what my settlement (and I) was able to handle. It was present in the base game too, but with things like mech clusters became seriously overdone and destroying any fun I had.
For starters, I only played (or attempted to) M&M 1 to 4&5, so the below review might not apply to the sixth title. First and second game have aged very poorly, and I don't mean the graphics there, I can put up with a lot on that front, if the gameplay and story is good. Lack of automapping, that I could maybe deal with, if rest of the game would make it worth it... but for example, every time you want to cast a spell, you need to consult the manual and provide its level and number from the table (unless you remember it), the games don't even have spell lists. I can't say more about them, as that's when I gave up and moved on to M&M 3. Third game has resolved the above issues, there's a Cartographer skill for drawing maps (Sorcerers start with it, but other classes can learn it in the first city for a low price, which is good, as if the character with a skill is unconscious or dead, they stop updating the map, so I'd suggest teaching more, or even all of them, the skill), and a spell list, too. However, the plot... there's a plot? I was pretty much going from place to place without a direction, killing everything that I found there, solving some puzzles, going back to the city to train and identify loot (which is also poorly done, the game only displays the item's stat when you identify it at a blacksmith store, ano nowhere else, forgot and or didn't write them down? Well, be ready to pay for identifying the item again) and the going out to aimlessly wander and kill monsters, until I find some other city or dungeon and hope it's not too difficult for my party (the game almost never gives any hints, where to go next). I gave up on it, when in one dungeon I ran into an annoying excuse for a "puzzle". There's a lot of levers, you can move some, some refuse to budge. No visible effects of moving them. No rules to the puzzle. Just figure it out! M&M 4&5 felt like more of the same, so I quit pretty fast. A quest. Then "Go to X.", but no direction at all. Well, bye.
Without too many spoilers - the success in the scenario depends in a good part on where you send your scouts - and since (when playing first time) you can't know where to look and for what, it effectively depends on if you are lucky when picking the direction. Other than that? Fairly fun, but the criitique in the other reviews feels quite accurate for me as well, so I won't just repeat that.
