So I beat the game at around 35 hours. Despite earning the achievement, the global tab still shows 0.0% on earning the beat the game T pose achievement.
The game is outrageously easy and simple to play. I did not play with manual aim, and instead let all the guns and abilities auto aim and use. You max all of your stats far before the end, so it is unclear what the point of difficulty 3 is (in theory you trade more experience for tougher enemies, a trade that never seems to make sense.)
There are a number of different game modes, but they all feel mostly the same. Default has you killing enemies, Endurance is the same but with no time limit, hardcore and boss rush are 10 mins instead of 20 with the only difference being that boss rush ends with a super enemy. Finally there is extermination which is by far the most unique, where you just destroy 20 waves.
The thing is, all of those modes give you the same powerups in the same order, so once you understand how to plan your level ups all levels feel the same. There is some randomness in the powers and items you can select from when you gain them, but this is easy to configure how you want with bans and rerolls.
So regardless of the character and mission, everything feels very much the same. Some builds let you stand still, others will have you going in circles clockwise, but in all cases the threat to you is minor. The 5th map of 5 forces you to move sometimes, but otherwise it is the same as the others.
The overall pace of the game is therefore very predictable. The game does a good job of constantly feeding you more points to spend on meta progression, although overall the trees are small and as I mentioned I maxed them all out far before the end.
The strangest part of the game is that 2 of the 3 strongest characters, SWAT and Tank are 2 of the first you get access to. This makes unlocking the others anti-climactic as they are all downgrades (except the medic who is priceless). The final character you unlock is by far the worst character of the group.
So, anytime you need to beat something, you just take your starting 2 chars. I feel the game would have been more interesting if the later characters were stronger rather than weaker.
Overall I had fun with the game. The meta progression is the real hook, and it is very easy to make good choices at the camp that make all the other missions a piece of cake. If you do a good job at camp, the real drag of the game is how many missions are 20 minutes long.... 20 minutes of boredom with the exact same powerups in the exact same order. You CAN speed this up by altering your PC clock speed, but it would be nice if the game just supported faster play speeds. Maybe the engine doesn't handle it smoothly if it goes faster?
All that said, not every game needs to be super tryhard. It is nice to have a relaxing super easy option on the market. Just know that the real meat to success is the training upgrades and not the missions themselves.
