Deadzone: Rogue

After their last game my expectations weren't super high but I absolutely loved DZR and I can't wait for DZR2. The main characters dialogue was silly but in a way that was fun to hear and only added to the experience imo and the core gameplay is super solid. Can't wait to take back earth!

Anything above "normal" difficulty, is too hard for solo players. Progression just stops after too little time, so you can't ever get strong enough to solo all the content on Hard+. Sector 1 only has starter progression. Nothing unlocked in Sector 2+ applies here. So no Superior Items, No Synergies, and no Nanite Forging. This makes many of its missions unnecessarily difficult. Sector 2 only has starter progression and superior items. No synergies or nanite forging. Sector 3 has every but nanite forging. Sector 4 has everything. Sector 4 missions are by far the easiest to solo. Gameplay wise its too heavily RNG based. If you get the things you need for a build, you can excel. If not, you are going to die and lose the run, no matter how skillful you are. You either get the DPS you need where you melt enemies in less than a second, or you die. The issue is enemies scale in health and damage excessively by the last wave. So if you aren't getting the right things, you aren't going to progress. Now there is a few variety in builds, but largely things offered to you are junk. For example: You have 7 elements = fire, cold, shock, void, plasma, nuclear, and singularity. You can only progress on cold shock or if its a campaign level, plasma. All others lack the dps to handle threats. I mention campaign for plasma, because its procs are stationary and last a while, so you stack enough of them, they melt a boss in seconds, rather than normally taking minutes, but surviving to reach the boss with plasma is often nearly impossible. I've completed almost everything on normal. The things I haven't are escalating difficulty, so it gets to Nightmare difficulty near the end or total BS challenges where you need one specific build and you die without it. There is one for sector 3, where you hit level 17 and the area is filled with tons of little spiders. Like 20-30 of them. They surround you and hold you down with their singularity suck in effects and you die. Only build that works is a chain lightning build, to deal with all the tiny hitboxes. But the issue is: I'm max starter progression, maxxed out superior items, and so there is nothing else for me to hunt for to even out the odds. Maybe if you had friends to play with the game might be a smoother experience, but for solo, it sucked. And I played solo. And the developer has moved on to the sequel, so nothing is going to change.