So wife and I finally finished up our MP playthrough and some thoughts after beating it:
Weapon balance is all over the place, but mostly manages to be fun. Assault Rifles and all Heavy Weapons basically suck balls, with the exception of the very early parts. This is largely due to the fact that most of the end game strategies seem to be centered entirely around critical hits and hit point sponge enemies. Basically, you want a spammy as fuck weapon with high crit rate on a guy. Then you just wait for the inevitable crit that one shots the mob, because the regular hits don't do shit most of the time. You do want one sniper, because they are good at nailing the suicide bomb mobs that can magically run from miles away and self destruct before you ever get a chance to hit them otherwise. Plus the sniper mark makes pistoleers ridiculous....
So I think pistoleer builds are probably the most broken for a number of reasons. First, outside of having someone to drop Mark on enemies, you do not need any outside help to make the build work. Second, great pistols drop like candy the entire game, enough to have two pistoleers well armed the entire run. Third, they can double as shotgun specialists (the next most ridiculous setup) for next to know investment when needed as such. Notably, they only really need one Perk to function in their own build, which is trick shot. Finally, mod wise they only need range and crit stacking on their pistol to really shine, which are much more easy to come by.
Process for pistol guy is thins: Have sniper mark something close by with a lot of health. Trick shot that whenever you need to reload meter, but mainly just spam away with pistil until the crit happens, which is a lot. Cover in the way or lots of guys? But out shotgun and correct the problem. You can easily crank out three shots a turn (four with Rally or other tricks) and by the end of the game every other shot will be a critical and every third shot will be a Precision shot. Our pistol character just flat out embarrasses the other characters with their kill rate. And all they need are two melee meat shields and the AI leaves them completely alone.
So, melee guys are also ridiculous but moreso for the AI's obsession with killing them. By mid to end game, you can have a sword guy who stacks movement enough to run the entire length of the map and still get three swings off. With maxed out STR and the crit immunity cybertech item, plus the abundant chest mod that just reduces most damage types by 60%, the character is basically immortal and can run in the middle of the enemy backfield and sponge damage, gobbling some toast if they get whittled down too far. Then you get your 1 AP punch spammer running midfield interference with the same defensive setup. The sword guy can crit and damn near one shot Scorpitrons, but thats not relevant. What is relevant is that the AI will swarm the one or two Melee duders and let your ranged guys pretty much do whatever it is you want. The suicide bomb enemies are the exception to this, so you just need to single them out first. The SMG guy is still doing decent, but realistically he might as well not exist because the melee and pistol characters are facerolling things.
I really wished they had learned from the last game to make armor worthwhile. To a degree they did, but basically it just stops mattering at all by mid game, except for the melee guys. Crit spam is also a dumb way to build combat and it would be nice to see steady damage be the staple tactic instead of waiting around for a crit to do 99% of the health so that I can apply the last love tap to the enemy. The rework of Initiative is also really stupid and I wish they had kept it to what the last game was, but I guess their focus was on multiplayer and the old Initiative mechanic would have made it unplayable. Instead, we are back to AP is king and coordination being the god stat again.
Other major criticism I have is the distribution of mods in the game. Most gear has decent drop rates. Ammo especially is well thought out because you will always have enough if you diversify weapon selection a bit. The mods however, are annoying. Specifically a number of bread and butter mods (+ Range, Leg Armor movement, head armor mods in general) are way to infrequent and practically stop appearing at all in later stages of the game. This would not be a big deal if it was just the really outstanding mods (like the reduce all damage or -1 AP per shot clip) being rare, but many of the more powerful mods drop like crazy. This is further aggravated by not being able to break down armor (so those are harder to obtain) and not being able to remove mods to preserve decent ones. End result is you wind up spending most of the game with the mod collecting dust, because you know the moment you cave and slot it a better version of the same gun/armor will drop ten seconds later and make you rage. Being able to remove mods once you hit a certain skill would end the issue with minimal effort and I hope they consider this.
Those gripes aside, this game was fun and about on par with WL2, though it felt different (more tripple A less raw) than its predecessor. Bugs and balance aside, its worth the money and has some good replay potential. It is somewhat shorter than WL2, but the quest variety is much better and the story has a little more meat on it rather than being a soft retread of WL1.
