Played this with a friend on normal difficulty so I cannot speak on the game as a solo offline experience nor how aggressive it scales its difficulty. Aesthetically speaking the theme they went for was good and the actual game's visuals and effects are stunning and satisfying to see play out however I believe the biggest drawback to it all is the poor execution of macho dialogue and story progression after the introduction to its premise. The story treats itself something similar to a low budget 90s action movie with nothing ever subverting expectations or feeling like they've been polished and fine tuned for a more memorable and impactful story. As for the gameplay itself I actually really enjoyed all the moves, weapons, abilities available to the player as the game progresses. While looking at reviews for this game before and after owning it I recalled seeing some keywords that stood out; jank and repetitive. I absolutely cannot ever say that this at any point janky (especially as someone who has played some really shitty laughably horrible controlled games) but it seems like a lot of people who refer to this game as janky have been spoiled massively by games such as the modern God Of War games so I cannot blame them for thinking this gameplay is subpar in comparison especially when the variety in combos can feel extremely limited with select enemies. As for Evil West being repetitive I can only understand this take from someone whose marathoning it from beginning to end. I absolutely don't think this game would benefit from introducing new enemy types or unique bosses per level, the combination of common enemies and special enemies from area to area should have felt more of a challenge in figuring out the optimal way to play than filler that mindlessly increases the difficulty (even if I agree that the way the enemies can just gang up and one tap you almost instantly feels criminal compared to the effort needed to take a couple of them out). the biggest offenders to me personally for this game were the bugs( an example I can think of was my friend who said the parry button and actions tied to it stopped working at the last level), lack of quality control for the coop (no reason I have to wait for someone else to finish their animation moving forward in-between areas to move forward to it myself) and overall uninteresting story. If they ever produced a sequel I'd be more interested in seeing them prove that co-op was more than just an afterthought and that the story was more well presented because currently both of those two are the biggest reasons my score is low. also worth mentioning that the final level is SOOO brutal even with a 2nd player at your disposal I absolutely do not want to attempt that myself.