Just got done going through this game and the story DLC with a friend. I feel like you can already make an assumption just from the key art and the store description, but it's one of those "games of all time."

Not great, not terrible, it's the worst thing a game can be – unremarkable. The popular description of "Dark Souls with guns" is not entirely inaccurate, but it mostly applies to combat. You have bonfires that respawn enemies, estus flasks that can be upgraded, stamina bar that depletes when you run or dodge (but not from melee attacks), and the general flow of combat typically revolves around dodging or i-framing through attacks and then retaliating.

The comparison stops when it comes to the overall structure of the game. You're still sort of a weak little loser going through a dying world, but there's nothing to explore here. Like there is almost an aggressive lack of things happening here.

The way it works is that you have your home base in Ward 13. A safe little area disconnected from the world. You'll generally come back here just to upgrade stuff. From this base, you teleport into other areas, which the game calls "worlds," or at least Steam page does. I don't think I actually saw them call it that in the game itself, so at first I wrote "think of them as acts" before checking if they have actual names.

Anyway, each of the 4 worlds comes with a big-ish and open-ish procedurally generated hub map. From that map you go into procedurally generated dungeons, which will then lead into one of randomly rolled bosses. Checking the list after completing the game, I'd say we missed roughly 40-50% of them? There is a finite amount of bosses you can fight, so you would need to do the game at least twice and get good rolls to see every boss.

That's not a huge deal since you still get constant boss fights, the problem is everything in-between. It feels like everything that exists in the gap between boss fights is meaningless filler. There's nothing to discover, nothing to explore, no interesting loot or treasure to find, it's just very bland procgen world where everything starts to look the same after a while. Go to a new world, clear dungeon, fight boss, go through hub to next dungeon, clear dungeon, fight boss. There are some neat visual ideas now and then, and enemies can generally keep you on your toes with how they complement each other or use different attacks, but you mostly just fight the same 2-3 enemies per world, and you do it A LOT. Looking at the same things and fighting the same encounter gets dull so quickly!

You generally get a drastic change of scenery just as the previous one really starts to get exhausting, but the RPG part of the system never helps to combat the monotony. You don't really find loot in this game. You generally just find rings and amulets, while most weapons are down to killing bosses and then converting their drops into either a weapon or a weapon mod (special abilities that can be slotted into weapons or come with the weapon in the case of boss guns).

Armor sets are a bit more obtuse. Some are found in the world, some are hidden behind puzzles or repeatedly teleporting, some are from random events that might not happen. Generally it's just not a thing you really find, and it doesn't truly matter because the most important thing about the armor is the set bonus. My starter set provides 20% extra weakspot damage, so I had no real reason to swap it for everything else, given that I was playing around the weakspot damage and already invested into that.

After a certain point you are generally discouraged from trying out new things because the new areas expect you to go in with stronger gear, but bringing new equipment up to par would require a lot of money and resources.

So we ended up in a situation where we're looking at the same things, fighting the same enemies, and using the same gear. At that point those bosses were the only highlight, even when some of them were ass. Worth mentioning that we played on Hard here, but that's second out of four options, and I'm not sure how different Normal would be.

Much of the frustration usually came from the fact that most of the bosses are absolute bullet sponges in co-op, yet they also have extremely high damage attacks, with the one-shots not being super uncommon. One mistake can easily spiral into death, and some bosses straight up either leave no room to revive your friend, or might only allow an occasional short window depending on how their attack patterns stack up. None really took us all that long, but it was rarely an enjoyable experience.

Riphide deserves a special mention. It's one of the earliest bosses you fight, and the whole gimmick is that it splits up each time you deplete one segment of its health bar. After some point, there a bunch of them on the stage, and they start doing a wave/pulse attack that goes a very long way and when multiple of them start doing it, it's not uncommon to find yourself in a situation where your only option is to roll through one wave only to get hit by another as you recover. Unbeatable? Hardly. But so much of it felt like it was up to luck that it was also hardly fun.

It doesn't help that bosses can have random traits that can significantly impact the difficulty due to the way they combine with the arena/ads/boss patterns. One of the earliest ones we fought had a random trait that made status inflicting explosions spawn under us. Said explosions has a fairly weak visual cue and seemingly no or extremely faint sound cue, leading to a few deaths that just felt random and out of our control. On another boss, we had the "Vicious" trait that gave them 133% damage and turned certain attacks that should be survivable into one shots. I really don't mind much of the ♥♥♥♥ the game throws at you, but I don't think these traits really made any boss fight feel more interesting. Aside from "enchanter" spawning explosions, these traits simply made them tankier or gave them more damage.

I can't rightfully comment on the story, because a co-op playthrough is not really the best way to experience the narrative. Outside of main story cutscenes, there are lengthy text logs, character dialogues, item descriptions, computer logs, and some audio logs. We went into almost none of those, so we only got into the basics of "the root is infecting the planet, go to the tower, slay the dragon, save us from the root." From what I understood, the root is sort of like the flood in Halo, ♥♥♥♥ that spreads everywhere and spreads so much that it's easier to nuke the whole planet than trying to come up with another method. I did look up some plot threads and it seems like there could be interesting stuff here if you're willing to delve into it. However, even if it might end up pretty good, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ does this game love doing the sci-fi thing of just drowning you in proper nouns. It's almost comical at times.

I might reevaluate my feelings about this game in the future, after doing it solo and paying proper attention to everything, but for now I feel like it's just a really underwhelming ARPG that does very little to warrant any interest.