I remember when I came across the original GunZ, it was kinda unique for the time. An online third-person shooter/hack-n-slash game with MMO elements and Matrix-style acrobatics. I know everybody loved that game for the broken and exploitable mechanics in PvP, but I really enjoyed the PvE missions as well. I could never really get the hang of the broken mechanics, but I tried! I remember one girl teaching me to do those, asking me "how many buttons do you have on your mice?" and me going "What do you mean? 3 of course" and her going "hm, that's bad". I didn't even know mice could have more at the time.

For the sequel, it seems, the devs were trying to accommodate people like me by getting rid of the broken mechanics. I mean, I never really wanted them gone, but okay. I remember playing this for 20 minutes on release lol. I still had that logged in Steam with the "last played" date being 2014.

But the truth is by 2014 nobody was amazed by an MMO-esque online shooter or by the combination of melee and range combat. Practically every game's multiplayer became MMO-esque by then. Call of Duty and Battlefield were dominating that space.

It's kinda incredible that you can still play the PvE missions in this game, but not sure why you'd want to! As a single-player game this is just horrendous. In fact by the 2014 standards I think the gameplay here is VERY outdated. They just send hordes of dumb enemies at you that are easy to mow down. This was okay for a mid-2000s hybrid MMO-ish game, but by 2014 it's kinda unacceptable. And the art-design, which I really liked in the original, is very unpleasant to me here. It's very anime with lots of oversaturated toxic colors.

For fun though, try turning off the anti-aliasing. This is probably the only game where anti-aliasing means "all the visual effects invented post 2002". Because it makes the game look like those videos that make Doom 3 run on Windows 98.