The art, graphics, and sound (VO, sound effects, music, etc) is all stellar. This is to be expected as the considering the pedigree and budget behind the game. The shell of this game is incredibly enticing and production values are top notch.
The
story is unoriginal and has been done to death. How many games are you
considered the one, have a floating spherical robot that does things,
and you're fighting off a massive universal evil by shooting aliens?
The
character progression and systems are mediocre at best with major
talents doing things that "proficiencies" do in other games and because
there are only 3 classes, the limited talent trees don't offer anywhere
near the amount of variety you'd expect from a loot dropping action RPG.
The loot dropping happens too few and far between with bosses
rarely if ever dropping loot and the loot that does drop, like the
talents, rarely does anything to change things as it focus's solely on
the damage or armor and not the actual function of the gun or armor.
This means pretty much all guns and armor in the game function the same
minus small stats that increase reload speed, make grenade cooldowns
shorter, increases melee damage, etc. aka basically stuff that would be
done in proficiencies in other games but not things that make getting
new weapons and armor feel unique and worthwhile.
The gameplay
is painfully basic with not much changing outside of gun types, mostly
due to the wishy washy "power" system lacking depth and the item
randomization being so poor. This means, don't expect anything
groundbreaking because outside of the handful of powers and
doublejump/jetpacks, the gameplay is the norm. If you've played any
fps's you've seen it and done it already.
The lack of any kind of
economy system and trading is confusing. Hey I get you don't want
other players to trade gear, which the gear is nothing of note but
whatever, but even in Monster Hunter if you want to trade you can still
trade other items besides gear. For a game that's being hyped as a MMO,
this seems like a huge over site.
Only allowing three players on
quests is also very weird and incredibly disappointing. Four players
seems standard for a game like this but for whatever reason, they
decided to go with 3, which is incredibly annoying when trying to play
this game with friends. If anything, you'd expect games to INCREASE the
number of teammates not lower it. To take it a step further, the lack of cross platform play for a game that's supposed to be a MMO, even with systems in the same network (360 with XB1 or PS3 with PS4) seems like a pretty big over site.
That said, the game is fun
with a group of friends, like any coop game, and it looks and sounds
nice. However there are shortcomings which boggle the mind, especially
in a game that has a $500 million budget. There are much better loot
based action/rpg's out there, there are much better FPS's out there, and
there are much better MMO's out there. I understand it's a blend of
the 3 but it's not the first to do this nor is it the best. This is a
mediocre game with a lot of polish, the type of game that focus's on
graphics over gameplay and depth.
6/10
