Weighty Movement and Immediate Impact
The moment your boots hit the dirt, the controls tell you everything about the tone. Your soldier turns with actual mass, swings heavy rifles with noticeable drag, and eats dirt hard when diving away from claw strikes. It is not an agile character action game. The delay between swinging your barrel and getting your reticle settled forces you to plant your feet before squeezing the trigger, and that physical inertia works in its favor.
Dodging is an outright dive straight onto your stomach. You can fire backwards from the dirt, roll sideways to clear a spewing bile sack, or scramble up while reloading on the run. The collision on monster legs and charging armor is surprisingly solid. Bugs will push you back, trample you into dust, and knock your crosshair wild if they land a direct swipe. It feels raw and deliberate.
Squad Tactics and Friendly Fire Panic
Arrowhead built the whole loop around squads of four, and friendly fire is on at all times. A stray burst from your machine gun will cut down a squadmate instantly. Calling in an airstrike requires you to dial directional inputs on the keypad, throw a beacon, and sprint out of the blast radius before the shells level the hill. If an ally trips over a rock and drops inside that marker zone, they are dead meat.
The chaos never feels like random nonsense because your death is always someone's bad positioning or a poorly thrown beacon. You burn through reinforcements fast on higher difficulties. Dropping back in from orbit via a drop pod lets you steer your landing right into a heavy target to crush it, turning a casualty into an improvised offensive strike. The full English voice acting keeps the team chatter clear when radioing callouts, which is useful when everything on the screen is exploding.
Managing Swarms and Weapon Handling
Each bug variant pushes you to use your kit differently. Small crawlers test your hip-fire tracking, while armored chargers demand that you break their plating with heavy munitions or bait them into a wall to expose their rear flesh. The recovery after big impacts feels heavy. Getting hit by an acid spit slows your sprint to a crawl, forcing an immediate stim pack injection to clear the debuff and restore health.
Gunplay has real bite. Shotguns throw back lesser drones, and support weapons like the recoilless rifle require you to stay completely still while loading shells unless a buddy runs up to feed the ammo. When you switch to first-person sights, weapons sway hard depending on whether you stand, crouch, or lie prone. Fighting that heavy gun weight keeps simple skirmishes tense.
Rough Edges and the Grind for Gear
The game costs $39.99 on Steam and skips unnecessary bloat, but the performance takes hits when artillery blankets the field. Frame rates dip noticeably during massive extractions where dozens of enemies converge on the beacon amid smoke and fire. When the framerate stutters, lining up snap shots with sluggish support cannons becomes frustrating.
Unlocking new stratagems and weapons with earned Requisition gives you steady progress, yet several planet defense missions repeat identical outpost layouts. You run to a terminal, tap in button codes, defend the position for three minutes, and sprint to extraction. Arrowhead nails the core mechanical feel of firing into a swarm, but mission variety needs to catch up to the gunplay.
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Proper brilliant mate. The way the recoil kicks on the railgun had me grinning like an idiot. Reckon its the best forty quid ive spent in ages.
Friendly fire is just the game checking if you trust your mates. Spoiler: you dont.
haha frank that railgun kick got me good first time i fired it almost dropped my controller the bile titan went down so fast and the orbital strike visuals are crazy good my 3070 struggles a bit during extraction but totally worth it
played a few hours with my grandson, the friendly fire had us both in stitches lol. railgun recoil is no joke mate. missions do repeat a bit but its the squad chaos that keeps me comin back. - frank
@wombat_23haha frank that railgun kick got me good first time i fired it almost dropped my controller the bile titan went down so fast and the orbital strike visuals are crazy good my 3070 struggles a bit during extraction but totally worth it
Review talks up the heavy weapons but totally skips stratagem cooldowns. Feels like you're constantly waiting on timers instead of trying out different combos, kind of kills the fun.
Proper brilliant mate. The way the recoil kicks on the railgun had me grinning like an idiot. Reckon its the best forty quid ive spent in ages.
that final push was a total mess, mate. my aim was absolute trash, but honestly just glad we made it out alive!
the way the squad actually works together when things get hot is sick. watching a teammate go down and trying to get them back up in the middle of a swarm is intense.
@Phil M.Friendly fire is just the game checking if you trust your mates. Spoiler: you dont.
the missions get repetitive fast, honestly. feels like i'm just doing the same stuff over and over on every planet, but it's chill enough for a quick session after work.
@mkc78fair dinkum, the game isn't exactly easy, but those frame drops are brutal. feels like the game is chugging hard whenever stuff explodes, strewth, mate! your take is spot on, though.
@pjh81Frame drops during extraction? Never heard of her. My 3080 cries whenever a Bile Titan shows up though. Am I bad at this or does the game just hate my GPU?
@pjh81Frame drops are definitely worst during extraction when people spam orbital strikes at the same time. Even saw it stuttering pretty hard on a 4080.
@mkc78you clearly didnt play it if you think missions repeat. theres like 5 objective types total mate. spread democracy not misinformation