Firstly want to say to install onto a internal drive rather than an external drive if you plan to download and play, it will be unstable otherwise and introduce many issues such as improper cutscene timing
The best analogy I can fathom is this is Left for Dead if it felt uninspired, not to discount the decent work by the voice actors and graphics teams. Soulless feels like too harsh of a word but it's what comes to mind. It doesn't support a proper singleplayer experience; there are bots but they are glorified mobile turrets at best and do not utilize player-placed utility and cannot be ordered around. There is no traditional 'tutorial' level that I could easily locate, and the game tries to let you figure out the mechanics yourself. First person mode seems to be locked behind the Aftermath upgrade, which when I tried it, still sends you into third person during various animations. Campaign is sectioned into chapter-style segments, and I had only played some of the first campaign listed, New York. The game suggests Easy difficulty at first, which I went along with since I was playing alone and haven't played before.
My first experience with the horde mechanics were met with satisfaction. I came across a machine gun and used it to good effect to knock down the laddering Zekes. I then proceeded to be pummeled into the ground by the Charger from wish.com ( "The Bull" ) until the bots figured out I needed help.
Outside of that, gunplay was not something that I found enjoyable in the game. Automatic weapons felt samey, burst weapons felt ineffective. There's an option for explosive rounds through the Fixer class but I was running Medic to limited effect. Because it was on easy difficulty, minimal damage was sustained and I felt like my class was doing little to nothing. The stim pistol mechanic was confusing as well; I thought the stims could only go to my own player before discovering that I had to HOLD the button I was using for them, see again my point about there being no tutorial.
The game's play cycle seems overtly repetitive and I got quickly bored of it in my whopping one hour of playtime.
Silenced pistol takedowns and melee on Zekes to prevent getting flooded by manageable hordes in the event the bots shoot loud weapons anyway.
Mild spoilers for first two chapters of New York ahead.
Level two has you take a needlessly risky detour instead of... the obvious path of walking atop the train to use it as a bridge to a platform on the other side. Not to mention that there was a fakeout with the train driver about to betray the group of survivors, before he relents nigh-immediately after the group moves to attack him. I presume that such things would be common throughout the entirety of the game but do not wish to find out if such is the case, thusly refunded after this point.
