A lot of negative reviews I see seem to focus on how the Redux compares to the original, issues with Deep Silver/Epic, or just say it sucks. I played about 20 minutes of the original 8 years ago and remember none of it, and don't care about whatever issues there are with the companies, so I'll just give my thoughts on the game on its own.
First, the parts of the game I enjoyed. The weapon customization stuff is cool, and I did enjoy the different feeling of all the guns. While I would absolutely not say the human AI was intelligent, I did enjoy getting to sneak around and pick off the human enemies from the shadows. The world is interesting, and the game looks quite nice.
Now, the parts I don't like. I played through on survival ranger. From what I experienced, you can lump any given part of the game into one of two general categories: fighting mutants, or fighting humans. There's also a fair bit of cinematic slog, which the fans will bill to you as its engaging story. I won't comment on the quality of the story, because frankly, I was more interested in the gameplay experience.
Fighting humans is fun. There is not enough of it. This keeps you from realising the shallowness of it due to the brain damaged AI, but it also means that there is less fun in the game.
Fighting mutants is tedious. A lot of the time you are fighting mutants, you will be fighting alongside allies. These allies are invincible and have infinite ammo. This combined with the emphasis on resource management and the large amount of damage required to kill mutants means that, whenever you are with an ally, the most effective strategy is going to be sitting in a corner while they kill everything. I find this to be bad game design.
When you are dealing with mutants and do not have allies, the most effective strategy is usually to sprint through the level as fast as possible, so that the AI of the mutants cannot keep up with you. This also sucks, but fighting the mutants usually just winds up being more annoying than its worth, and depletes your resources to boot.
Side mechanics tend not to be implemented very well. For example, the trade system. The ammo as currency system is a very interesting idea, on its face. In practice, it costs so much to buy anything and you get so little in return for selling ammo and weapons that you are dissuaded from doing anything but buying the occasional filter or medkit. I was intrigued by the airgun that fires ball bearings, but found that I had to sell everything I had to afford it. After doing so, I immediately discovered the exact same gun lying around for free once I entered the next area, and also discovered that ball bearings are a very rare form of ammunition out in the field. Essentially, I'd done nothing but gimp myself for no benefit. Buying and customizing weapons seems to be quite pointless.
My fun peaked shooting up people in Black Station. Past that, the game seemed to do nothing but become more and more frustrating, reaching a peak with the library. The librarians sound incredibly annoying and can tank over 10 knives thrown directly into their face. Sneaking around them is a chore. Again, the strategy was simply to sprint past them. After a few more sections that primarily relied on letting my companions kill all of the monsters, I reached the end, which was mostly cinematics and scripted events with very little satisfying gameplay.
Oh, and before I forget, the game is not especially polished from a technical perspective. It has insanely long load times that eat up all of your RAM, sometimes to the point of crashing itself and other programs. Several times, I was attacked by a librarian and had the game instantly crash. Towards the end, there was a table with a heap of loot on it which would instantly crash the game whenever I picked up a certain item. At one point, I was fighting off hordes of mutants with some allies, and the fight just seemed to stop. I only realised what had happened after much searching around: one of the mutants had phased through a solid wall, and the game would not progress until it was shot dead. Thankfully, it was more than willing to phase back through it when I walked by in order to attack me.
This is a game that feels as if it has a lot of potential and promises a lot of fun, but never really delivers. I'd imagine other games in the series have probably improved greatly on the formula. This one is not worth your time. Skip it.
