I hope they find a middle ground between 2016 and Eternal. I enjoyed the overall Character-Action-Ification of Eternal, but it's bit over-systemic in terms of how much of the game is cooldown management. It gets a bit silly when the primary purpose of a flamethrower is just armour generation instead of... setting things on fire... while things like melee punches literally doing unless you've done 2 glory kills etc are also odd.
In general too it felt like a game designed around the entire arsenal's availability, and until you had everything it felt a bit too prescriptive in the optimal way to fight stuff.
The DLCs took it a step further with "stuff that must be killed with x weapon mod" too. Overall a lot of the game felt on UV like I was running in circles doing hit and runs rather than taking the fight directly to them. I never really got the design director's comments about wanting it to be a "thinking mans FPS" - ultimately it's so cooldown heavy and systemised that it felt more like a playable flowchart rather than needing to think and make real decisions.
I think ULTRAKILL is the gold standard for what Eternal was trying to achieve, doing so without so much cooldown management and encouraging "natural" frequent weapon switches. Eternal at its best can pip 2016 for intensity, but at its worst it's quite a bit below that baseline.
It also needs way, way more cohesive tone both writing wise and visually. Eternal felt like a real hodgepodge.
clawsomegamer.com
