Technical improvements that make it more of a chore to play. I couldn't quite decide whether the game was great or terrible. When it clicked it really clicked, but in every other moment I found it annoying more than anything. The hub world breaks the arcade-like level progression that made the previous one so easy to digest and the level design fixates itself too much on climbing. It's balanced around new features such as the precision weak-points and Flamebelch, which meant even more of my hitting the wrong key since I'm bad at the FPS genre. Personally I don't like gore and the previous game was just about my limit already, so implementing real-time damage as you blow chunks of flesh off the enemies was offputting. Neither of those two are a fault of the game itself at all but nevertheless it was something that discoloured my experience some.
They added a bunch of little touches onto the formula to make it more complex, but a lot of it felt in excess. The ability to skip cutscenes was a much-needed QoL fix, but being bombarded with hub worlds and platforming and puzzles and an absurd amount of tutorials ultimately meant more and more things that impede my ability to mindlessly shoot things for hours. The more complex attack patterns from enemies such as the Marauder and Hell Knight were highly frustrating and having so many of these enemies simply impossible to target with the chainsaw feels like a slap to the face. It's supposed to be a one-hit kill for the sake of fun. What's even the point of having it when it can't hit anything you actually want it to? Ugh. They take away explosive barrels right around the point where you realise you can combine the 'immune to explosions' + ' explosive barrels drop ammo' + 'explosive barrels regenerate' perk too. It feels like fun was not on the forefront in that decision. Even on easy mode I found this was significantly more difficult than the 2016 game. However this didn't enhance the experience any. It instead unfortunately made it even more repetitive, and with all this together there were times I was tempted to drop it.
They added a bunch of little touches onto the formula to make it more complex, but a lot of it felt in excess. The ability to skip cutscenes was a much-needed QoL fix, but being bombarded with hub worlds and platforming and puzzles and an absurd amount of tutorials ultimately meant more and more things that impede my ability to mindlessly shoot things for hours. The more complex attack patterns from enemies such as the Marauder and Hell Knight were highly frustrating and having so many of these enemies simply impossible to target with the chainsaw feels like a slap to the face. It's supposed to be a one-hit kill for the sake of fun. What's even the point of having it when it can't hit anything you actually want it to? Ugh. They take away explosive barrels right around the point where you realise you can combine the 'immune to explosions' + ' explosive barrels drop ammo' + 'explosive barrels regenerate' perk too. It feels like fun was not on the forefront in that decision. Even on easy mode I found this was significantly more difficult than the 2016 game. However this didn't enhance the experience any. It instead unfortunately made it even more repetitive, and with all this together there were times I was tempted to drop it.