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I really want to like this game. Echoing other reviews, excellent concept but the execution leaves a lot to be desired. If you enjoy games like XCOM, Highfleet, Starsector, Duskers, anything Battletech-related, it's worth keeping an eye on.

Having played an earlier version (than Update 35), it's had a bunch more features added but some things appear to be worse off.

Balancing/difficulty curve is the major weakness right now, not even counting the management and assembly mechanics.

In that previous version I played, you could get by the easiest missions with the starting equipment and mechs. Now, they're wholly inadequate with the addition of static hostile turrets to all levels. Cool feature, but it means you're facing a brick wall from the get go. Ideally, they'd show up less frequently.

If that weren't enough, some of the equipment and mechs seem to have been nerfed to some degree - used to be able to get energy shields, melee defence and some passive armour to speak of on your starters - now they lack the capacity for that, and any weapons worth a damn.

Any mission that features enemies except the basic crabs are a no-go. Your basic weapons and mechs, even in their "meta" configurations, are nowhere near powerful enough to stop just one of them from demolishing your team. Their health, damage and armour are a few orders of magnitude greater than the basic enemies - they're practically bosses instead of the slightly more threatening mobs they ought to be.

Somewhere between that previous version and the current, the mech/pilot AI or something about the command system got changed - a couple times I've had one of my pilots just stand still at the entry point while the rest of the team wanders off, and they don't respond to the movement orders anywhere near as promptly.
Could be that I'm missing some base upgrade that enabled finer control that I forgot to grab this time round, but idk.

Anyway. With some more sane and fair balancing, better tooltips (which have improved already), this could be absolutely great. The underlying systems are really cool. But right now? Needs a bit more time in the oven.

Oh, I'll also mention that the game doesn't display properly in fullscreen at 1680x1050, and from what I've read, this won't change.

CA/Sega forcing the consumer to decide whether to pay £2.50 just to re-add blood, which was only removed to get a lower age restriction, is them having their cake and eating it too. And here I am helping feed it to them. Cheeky bastards.

If you're new to the series:

I'd strongly recommend holding off buying Bannerlord until the game is stable, has proper mod tools released, and isn't so crash-happy. In the mean time, check out Warband. If you don't like it, you won't like Bannerlord.
There are myriad total-conversions from high-fantasy to the old west, to established fictional universes.

Some recommendations:
Prophesy of Pendor - Low-fantasy, well-balanced, lots of new features and content. I describe it as "The game M&B was a proof-of-concept for".
1257 AD - Generally historically-accurate Crusade-era Europe and Mediterranean, has a bunch of novel mechanics too.
Full Invasion: Osiris - Fun horde mode MP mod, uses content from a bunch of other mods
Bannerpage - Attempts to recreate some Bannerlord mechanics and generally improve on the vanilla experience, which it does pretty well.

Back to Bannerlord, it seems to be in the painful phase of debugging and fixing; taking precedence over addressing gameplay and balance issues (encompassing every aspect), missing/incomplete features, etc.
That said it's certainly enjoyable and mostly stable if you play it vanilla - If using mods to address gameplay concerns or otherwise enrich it, prepare to face crashes and spend hours trying to narrow down the culprits - and for proceeding updates to break them all anyway. Fortunately you can roll back to previous betas - The most stable modlist I had was on 1.4.1

Positives compared to Warband:
Movement and combat are a lot smoother and more visceral. Directional shield-blocking is cool. Sieges, conceptually, no longer suck hard and have some actual depth to them. Horse handling is much improved and more challenging. Army management is somewhat less painful. Obviously, it looks better but sound design is also much improved. City scenes actually feel expansive (but are still kinda lifeless). Being able to smith your own weapons is fun, as is having a fairly customisable colour scheme based on your banner.

There are more, and this list doesn't really do each of them justice. But as of yet I've not been able to stick with the game long enough to get a handle on its diplomacy/trade/vassal-hood/kingdom management (except they're broken in their own ways), on account of instability/mods breaking/other issues.

Things that make me concerned:
Last I played, battle AI are really dumb, especially in sieges where you can't expect to be able to mitigate casualties by commanding your troops. Siege needs its own set of commands. Back to the original point, the enemy troops don't break formation even in situations where it's suicide to maintain it. Both your own troops and those of the enemy fail to use their shields to best defend themselves, often leaving their flanks open to the bulk of archers.Troops can practically merge into one another on the battlefield due to small collision boxes. There are simple mods to fix this (just changing a variable), but they seem to break their interaction with some siege engines and ladders.

Bows, crossbows and throwing weapons are very easy to use compared to Warband's, and inflict heavy casualties even against top-tier troops; This is compounded by aforementioned AI issues.
Edit: Ranged accuracy was recently overhauled, and is similar to Warband - You have to be deliberate with your aiming, shot accuracy is only at its maximum for a short window before it begins to diminish again. It feels much better. Not sure how the AI have been affected by it but in MP it feels much less cheap to hit someone with a Javelin.

Some weapons seem broken in how powerful they are, this is most visible in multiplayer.
For example, a Menavlion (heavy cutting spear) can deal lethal damage from the beginning of its swing, even if it's already "touching" the first opponent it hits before beginning the movement.
Obviously in reality the force behind it would be severely diminished because it didn't have time to build momentum.
Similarly, it deals cutting damage with its haft. I get the impression that the factors that allow for stuff like this to make combat jankier run deeper than simple damage variables and such.

Armour values are kinda all over the place, as are how they interact with damage types. This adds to the ranged v melee disparity since they do piercing, largely ignoring armour.
The game's armour system needs modifiers and thresholds vs each damage type, per armour type imo.
For example a peasant's self-made bow that's barely guaranteed to kill small-game isn't going to be punching an arrow through plate, while the quality of a sword-swing might be the difference between cutting into armour vs the flesh of its wearer.

Troops' HP are all 100, with perks that can add a handful more in total. The disparity in physical strength and resilience you'd expect between elite troops and the most raw recruit isn't really represented in this aspect, mainly through skills and armour.

Movement speeds are all over the place, varying a lot between troops, while generally too high. The player is outrun by pretty much all other units to begin with; other than that it makes combat feel a lot less deliberate, you can simply move and change directions faster whilst also attacking/blocking.

Devs are seemingly unresponsive to many issues brought up by the community - but to be fair, the forums are flooded with such (mostly valid) criticisms and complaints, whilst they also have to contend with all the fixing there is to be done - which they're steadily plugging away at.

----------------------------------------------------
Overall it's fun, improves on its predecessor in many ways, but it has me worried about where it's going to end up. Ultimately it needs more time in the oven. Go get Warband, see what you think, then decide if jumping on Bannerlord's EA is right for you.

If you played Warband and enjoyed it, I'm fairly sure Bannerlord will become a better game overall given time. Right now, mired in bugs, relatively lacking in content, and with the simple uncertainty surrounding early-access, it's hard to recommend.

If you enjoy the likes of RO2/RS, or are otherwise interested in a relatively authentic Vietnam MP tactical shooter, sure. Get it on discount.

The developers have apparently moved on, with a final patch coming sometime in the future, apparently having been delayed due to covid. The game still has some outstanding issues and server owners in particular seem quite disgruntled, which is bad news for the playerbase's sustainability.

The standard of teamwork amongst the community usually amounts to the commander endlessly telling his team to get into cap in an increasingly frustrated and/or bored tone. There are few who actively coordinate within their squads and those around them. If you're a machinegunner and ask for ammo, if someone's close they'll usually sort you out. SLs will put up arty marks and commanders generally will use their call-ins, so not much different from RO2 onwards.

The biggest issue for me however is technical. For whatever reason, 3rd-person gunshots that are less than 50m away seem a lot quieter, instead of louder than those at distance as you might imagine they'd be. Not sure if it's just some bad juju on my end or if it's an intended function of the game, but it ♥♥♥♥♥ me hard.
I've had the same issue with two different motherboards and two different pairs of headphones. It was an issue when I first got the game, and still is now.

Pretty cool game for those who like relatively free-form building, designing units to deal damage and mitigate it for themselves. Especially if you're into diesel- and/or steampunk.
The things you have to account for and balance out in a unit's design are quite numerous and varied; Everything costs something and everything weighs something. A ship's maximum altitude - which is very important -is determined by its weight vs. lift, for example. This is probably the strongest part of the game.

So in combat, you'll be witnessing how those designs fare against the NPC (or enemy player) units; Did you actually give your ship enough coal to stay aloft through the average battle? Oh, it turns out this one has a massive structural weakness and will be cut in half by one or two rockets. Great job!
Each unit has a variety of commands, which is on a cool-down. You can pause at will (at least in SP) to think about your next moves as long as you need.
You have to manage the effective ranges of your units' weapons against those of the enemy, the disposition of your fleet to mitigate catastrophe, account for firing arcs to maximise firepower, keep track of their ammo, coal, water and repair stores.


The campaign ties this all into a metagame, in which you have to balance the costs of researching more technology to incorporate into your units; building, maintaining, repairing and refitting them, with taking territory, holding it against rival factions, and clearing out abominations in your territory that hurt your bottom line.

Unfortunately no part of the game is without idiosyncrasies. The UI is universally "functional, but crude" and the same could be said of every element to some degree.
The campaign for example lacks some relatively simple stuff, like showing how many ships are in each of your fleets without the player having to click on it, or being able to assign units into their own separate fleets instead of merging into one because they're in the same sector. A "repair all" button is absent for when it makes sense (edit: repair all button has been added).

Campaign AI is kinda bad; They usually stick to one or two ship designs, and either spam them because they have the income, or don't because they can't, so it's often a game of who's got the bigger and better deathstack.

Combat AI is hit-or-miss - Single ships will often stay put in the face of said deathstack's 1000 cannons. Meanwhile in small-scale engagements of fairly equal strength, they can be quite conniving, constantly trying to stay out your fields of fire.


Combat's biggest flaw is the apparent supremacy of explosive weapons and planes, which are pretty damn difficult to do anything about en-masse unless you've designed your ships to withstand them specifically; Missiles especially can practically saturate your entire fleet regardless of the ranges involved, and vice-versa.

The battlespace is quite restrictive and the only limit to ships you(or AI) can deploy in a battle is how many you brought, and how many of them fit in the deploy zone. In your average campaign battles get pretty crowded pretty fast, making battles fairly static.

But ultimately, it's still pretty addicting, and it's backed up by pretty damn good presentation. The soundtrack is quality. Gunfire, explosions, impacts and collisions all sound as they should. The visuals are nice, for the resolution of the sprites they're really quite detailed; fire, smoke and explosions are pretty, ship components disintegrate as they take damage.

And finally the game's still receiving updates a couple years post-release, with a fairly major feature on the way as of now.
For the price, it's more than worth it if this is your thing.

I loved the original Receiver for what it was, and in most respects Receiver 2 is a much more refined, immersive and just fun experience. It feels more like a game than the proof-of-concept the original was.
So why the negative review?

Receiver 2 fails to address its predecessor's biggest shortcoming; That its main feature - detailed firearm mechanics - is fundamentally at odds with its enemy design and the resultant combat loop.

EDIT: As of this edit, the devs are currently holding an AmA on reddit - They say they "have ideas" about addressing what I bring up here, for whatever that's worth. I'm cautiously optimistic, but will still lean towards recommending against until we see something concrete.

In Receiver, you must keep track of the condition of your firearm - Is there a round chambered? Are there rounds in the mag? Do you even have one loaded? Why are you trying to shoot with the safety engaged, idiot?
At its core, the game's challenge revolves around committing the various manuals-of-arms for each gun to muscle-memory, so as to not hear a click instead of a bang when you need one, nor accidentally shoot yourself when you go to holster it. The controls for this are purposely numerous (yet streamlined enough), unlike traditional FPS in which your character will handle this autonomously when you press R.
They're all easy enough to figure out, especially if you've already played the original

So that's cool right? These mechanics are made for those great moments where you just manage to clear a malfunction, or perform that perfect reload in time to fire off one last shot at the attacker bearing down on you.
Not so.

Receiver 2's caste of enemies is as follows (Same as the original):
Static gun-turret
Flying taser-drone

They both rely on built-in cameras to spot the player; until you enter their spotlights, they will remain idle and stationary (bobbing up and down lazily in the drone's case).
Once spotted, the drones chase you at high speed. The turrets will fire within ~1s of spotting you. Both are one-hit-kills.
Turrets obviously cannot pursue you, nor flush you out by eg. trying to wallbang you. Drones are poor at navigating, and will easily get stuck and even kill themselves on doorways and map props - but will also easily catch you if there's no obstructions between them and yourself.

These dynamics mean most direct-combat encounters play out the same way:
If not spotted, you have plenty of time to line up shots on their critical components.
If spotted you either retreat, or you attempt to out-shoot the assailant in the short window each enemy type presents you.

It also means that mag-fed weapons are in a weird space - you only ever need the one mag, because again if you're reloading you're either dead, or doing it in circumstances where you can take the time to eject the one you're using, top it up and re-insert it. Their only practical advantage in this context is capacity, ie you have to reload less frequently.

In other words, moments such as those described above almost never happen. Generally, the game's mechanics reward you more for avoiding fighting at all - due to ammo scarcity, and the ability to sneak past or leeeeroy your way through most encounters, it operates more like a survival-horror than anything else - but there's nothing for you to actually be afraid of other than totally running out of ammo.

TL;DR You're either under direct threat, where retreat is almost always the best option (because enemies forget about you within a few seconds of losing sight) and you otherwise won't have time to expend the ammo you have loaded - or you aren't, in which case you can take as much time as you like to fondle your gun and line up those next shots on unaware enemies.

At this point I can't say that Receiver 2's main selling point is anything more than a gimmick, without enemies that are able to actively search for you, attempt to outflank you, flush you out or otherwise surprise you - which would be necessary to make meaningful the time the player takes (and potential for making mistakes) in performing reloads and other operations.


As for positives:
Mainly direct comparisons to the original.

+ Massively overhauled visuals, while retaining the creepy surrealism.
+ Even more detailed modelling of the guns' mechanisms - Revolver cylinders can't be swung out with the hammer ♥♥♥♥♥♥, semi-autos can be loaded through the breech.
+ 5 more guns in addition to the original lineup; better models, textures, animations, feedback.
+ Reasons to actually use safe-practices; Engaging the safety, hammer-down on an empty chamber, straight up clearing it. You can ND into your foot and/or and/or leg and/or groin. You can be made to intentionally discharge into your face against your will.
+ Malfunctions; Failures-to-feed, failures-to-fire, failures-to-eject (Though some or all of these each only seem to happen to one firearm)
+ Better voice-acting, though I preferred RCV's more monotonous delivery
+ Even more background-lore/worldbuilding through the tapes and the new floppy-disks and notes.
+ Destructible glass!
+ Meta-progression; The game actually has levels now, so to speak.
+ Performance, level-streaming is much improved.
+ A little more variety, and generally more playable room designs
+ Sometimes magazines and revolver-cylinder chambers will randomly be welded/pinned, reducing their capacity, making weapons a little more variable.


Things other than more/better enemies I'd wished for that aren't there:
- Multiple weapons present in the game-world. You're stuck with the one you spawned with.
- The ability to choose which weapon you spawn with. You can restart the level by holding L, which will give you one of the guns you've unlocked at random, but that's unsatisfactory.
- No firing range (Yet?)
- No Shotguns, SMGs, Bolt-actions, Self-loading rifles
- Weapon accessories. Being able to find (or unlock) laser-sights, weapon-lights, red-dots, extended mags, speed-loaders (each where applicable) would've been really cool, adding a further sense of progression.

In summary, for now I'd only recommend getting it if you're a gun-nut, and/or really enjoyed the original RCV as it stood. It's a massive improvement over the original, but its core is exactly the same; if you were hoping for something more, avoid - for now. There are whispers that the main issue I bring up may yet be addressed; until then it's more Receiver 1.5 than 2.

As a successor to the Men of War series, Call to Arms fails to positively distinguish its self.
Every good and bad mechanic within the series is here, but they've barely evolved since 2004, with the exception of direct-control which is now first-person and a little more streamlined. Beyond that, CtA lacks the unit variety that made those games so much more interesting - partially as a result of the setting. Even within a modern setting, it's fairly bereft of content. On top of that, you're expected to pay for more than the two basic factions (US and generic Rebels) that are practically identical in their units' capabilities.

If the Conquest campaign mode has piqued your interest, prepare to be disappointed if you're anticipating a decent SP experience.
It's a bunch of skirmish maps chained together, putting you against AI that is far too lacking. I'd instead recommend looking at Men of War and its Dynamic Campaign Generator mod (which exists for AS 1&2 also).

If you really enjoy the competitive multiplayer of MoW and really want to see that gameplay translated into a modern setting, then go for it I suppose. But this is by far the most lacking entry to the series.

Avorion is a step above the likes of Space Engineers in that there's stuff to actually use your ship for. But currently it falls way short of its potential, owed to questionable design decisions so far.

Pro:
+ Massive creative freedom in designing ships - aesthetically, at least.
+ Effective art-style, kinda like Minecraft crossed with Homeworld
+ The ability to build and command separate ships to your own is cool

Room for Improvement:
~ Building UI and controls. They can be awkward and unintuitive, but get the job done if you're willing to take the time to figure it out.

~ UI in general can be indecipherable at times. Lots of obnoxious windows and tooltips. Some controls break functionality if they're not default.

~ NPC factions are practically indistinguishable from one another, using procedurally-generated ship designs that end up looking different, but the same. Certainly not how players would typically choose to design them. This leads to each part of the galaxy feeling practically the same as the last.

~ Mining is usually boring and tedious, until you can build and crew some AI ships to do it for you.


Con:
- Combat/construction mechanics that discourage creativity by virtue of lacking limitation. The only effective limitation on the power of your ship is the resources you have available.

Integrity Field Generators flex-tape over any potential structural weaknesses in your ship at a comparatively negligible cost to performance. This means that it doesn't matter where you're being hit, or where you're hitting the target - nor does it matter whether you buried your important components in a layer of armour deep in the bowels of your ship, or have them sitting on the outside of the hull. With IFGs, ships and their components stay almost entirely intact until their health-bar is depleted.

"Equip your ship with chainguns, lasers and other weaponry to take on your enemies and enjoy the sight of completely destructible ships breaking at the exact points where you hit them."
This claim in the description barely holds water.

Your ability to win fights is determined solely by the size of your hull and shields (= effective HP) vs opponents' firepower and vice-versa. Ships that are built for maneuverability and speed over firepower and tankiness are infinitely weaker - Even if you can dodge all the incoming fire, you'd have to keep it up for literal hours to destroy an equivalent ship that follows the "bigger is better" meta.

There have been changes to the mechanics of some weapons over time, some can bypass shields for example, but this is inconsequential as far as I've observed.

In addition to poor combat AI, whose behaviour boils down to "Close with target until in range", this all amounts to uninteresting combat past the Titanium sectors where NPC ships lack shields or IFGs.
Move your amalgamation of cubes into range of the enemy blocks of cubes. Hold Mouse1 until target is dead, or your shields are down. Retreat to recharge your shields (NPCs don't know how to use afterburners so can almost always be outrun), repeat until victorious.

Contact has some relatively novel ideas especially as applied to ArmA 3, as well as a decent amount of new content - I like most of what's here, but the way BI handles DLC makes it difficult to recommend for anything but its SP campaign, pissing around in the editor, or MP with small groups of friends who all own it. If I could give a "Mixed" rating I couldn't think of a DLC or game more deserving. Since I can't, I'm going to lean towards a no - unless it's on sale and/or you're made of money, and you really like single-player ArmA.

Content:
+ New first-party terrain. Livonia's pretty nice, with a good number of new buildings, and ones updated from earlier in the series - most of which you can use on other terrains regardless of whether you own the DLC. Performs better than Tanoa. Apparently has a new lighting system, though I'm playing on settings that make it hard to notice the difference - still, it looks good and has plenty of interesting areas for mission-makers to use.

+ First-party shotguns, that are about as powerful but as limited as you'd hope for them to be. Even cooler that one of them is an under-barrel. That said, no tube-fed/pump-actions which have always been weird when they've shown up in the series, modded or otherwise. Probably due to engine limitations.

+ The LDF's Promet rifles - Great sci-fi-esque design, and well up to the standard of the rest of the base game's content.

~ The LDF and Spetznas are fairly well-developed, but make heavy use of reskinned vanilla and content from other DLC (In which case, if I'm not mistaken, you only need to own Contact to use them). They're a decent extension of A3's 20-minutes-into-the-future setting, but still leave quite a bit to be desired.
There's also a decent amount of civilian and guerrilla gear added.

- Weapons, equipment and vehicles are practically unusable for players where large communities (who don't mandate ownership of DLCs) are concerned. As cool as much of the content is, in this context it might as well not exist unless everyone within a given community owns it, or that community is willing to exclude their players who lack it. This goes double for the terrain.

Campaign:
+ Introduces the EMSPEC device mechanic. It's nothing revolutionary but it's an interesting way of having the player discover points of interest and manipulate enemy forces. That said there are many instances where enemy units will refuse the forged orders you send them - particularly where it'd be most useful.

+ More free-roaming missions, lots of little scenes and story-building things for you to find.

+ A3jank considered, pretty good presentation and atmosphere.

+ Includes content (particularly weapons) from other DLCs, and allows you to use them in the campaign regardless of whether you own the parent DLC. Not sure if the nag-screen overlay shows up, if it does it is what it is. Still better than not being able to use it what-so-ever.

~ Fairly well-written story, but character dialogue (Particularly the player-character) often breaks suspension of disbelief - At least the voice acting's improved.

~ A lot of walking from A-B - you can use the handful of vehicles to traverse the terrain, but at least for me it was way too risky. I don't mind this personally, just wish there were more going on between POIs.

~ Performance is poor (Disclaimer: My performance is almost always objectively poor; the following is going by my standard). The free-roam missions especially have quite a lot going on, and while as far as I can tell most stuff isn't spawned in until you've moved into their general vicinity, and are cleaned up as you move further away, my FPS has been low throughout and made it a bit of a slog - the biggest gripe being inconsistency. I'm fine with 12fps if it stays that way, but when it's bouncing between that and 40 it's even more frustrating.
Poor framerates seem to adversely affect the timing of some scripted and dialogue sequences.
All that said, if you get decent performance in larger-scale MP scenarios you'll probably be fine.

- Many instances of "What am I meant to do now?". The direction given to you by the game/its characters ranges from lacking to misleading.

- Most missions require the use of the mini-UGV. If you're carrying it, anything inside when it's acting as a backpack is lost when you deploy it. Not ideal if on foot.

- Arbitrary restrictions on stealing uniforms. For whatever reason, you can't take the Spetznas' Granit uniforms or looters' clothes, even though you can take LDF uniforms.

- Has you going solo for the vast majority - while ArmA's AI can be frustrating and dumb, this doesn't play to the game's strengths. Flashpoint's Gastovski missions did stealth gameplay better despite their inclusion of AI teammates.

- The free-roam missions are slightly too restrictive geographically - I want to move a couple hundred meters further west to dodge this area I know is being patrolled by too many enemies to take on, but my character takes that as his cue to pack up and go home.

- Frustrating use of "Danger Zones" - Areas in which you're not allowed to savescum, regardless of difficulty settings. Even on the easiest possible settings, ArmA 3's a pretty tough game and that's only exacerbated by the fact you're often on your own in these missions. This can lead to retrying the same objective within a mission several times over, having to execute each step in your plan perfectly, any ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ reverting you back to that autosave.

- Some sub-objectives can't be completed if you complete the main objective, and their place within that structure is pretty weird. Eg (Very minor) disabling the UGV in Mission 4, "Ballistic Therapy". Regarding that same example, it also doesn't come up until you're close to that objective's main task, which in my case meant doubling back.

- ArmA 3 being ArmA 3. Continuing from the above example, the UGV got stuck(? Or that's just where it decided to stay) in defilade from the enemy infantry close by. I completed the hack, but it didn't do anything since it couldn't see or detect those enemies despite being within 20m. My player character says "Well that was effective" but lacking the sarcasm that would've been appropriate in this case lmao

- Speaking of which, the game forces you into a trap which, were it not a scripted sequence, the player would easily avoid. You can dump half a mag into the guy who locks you in the room before he "hides", ie disappears.

- Maybe it's just me being dumb, but I had a lot of trouble figuring out what I actually need to do with the EMSPEC device at certain points, particularly mission 4's main objective.

If you've read the DLC's description, this isn't a spoiler
Aliens:
They're much more Arrival crossed with Roadside Picnic than Independence Day or Battle: Los Angeles - which is cool, but given what ArmA 3 is, this is the most disappointing aspect of the DLC to me at least. When I first heard BI were making a DLC about aliens, what immediately came to mind was reliving the glory days of OFP (ArmA: Cold War Assault) addons, fighting massive alien invasion forces comprised of little green dudes with plasma guns, huge insect-like UFOs, Terminators and SST's Arachnids thrown in at the same time - just with more cohesive design & direction.
Then my cynical nature got the better of me, and turned out to be right:
The aliens we do get are little more than static models that move around, and launch attacks from other static models floating around them. No infantry, no explicit ground or air vehicles - outside of the campaign they're extremely boring, within the campaign they're used fairly effectively for what they are.

Good:
+ Excellent core mechanics - Mine minerals and complete your objectives while fighting off bugs, manage your ammo and supplies, and get out alive. Use the minerals and credits you earn to unlock weapon and equipment upgrades as well as cosmetics.

+ Accommodating difficulty levels, ranging from "walk-in-the-park" to "you're probably going to die" - and even more variability within those difficulty levels based on terrain generation, enemy types present and any mission mutators.

+ Satisfying combat with diverse weapons and enemy-types, tight gunplay and good hit feedback. Most bugs have armour that can be shredded through, or negated by hitting their weakpoints, or just by blowing them to pieces or burning them to ash. Killing them is just fun. They also have plenty of different ways to do you in.

+ 4 classes which each have a distinct set of weapons, tools and equipment. They all play very differently but synergise very well.

+ Good progression system - A new player with nothing unlocked isn't going to be significantly less effective than if they had everything available (with some exceptions).
Each weapon has multiple upgrades across several tiers to choose from, allowing you to optimise it according to the specific role you wish to fill.
This has been expanded with Matrix Cores and weapon Overclocks. More cosmetic options (armour skins, pickaxe parts/skins, weapon meshes with unique skins) were added through Cargo Crates and Lost Packs, which each have fun gameplay implications too.

+ Best destructible terrain since Red Faction - Theoretically you could mine out the entire map, but you won't have enough ammo.

+ Randomly-generated maps with no visible seams - each map type will follow a similar pattern based on the mission type, but will be distinct from one another.

+ Decent variety in mission types and environments. There are six biomes each with a distinctive look and unique hazards; There are five mission types which involve a mix of exploration, gathering, assault, point-defence and self-defence.

+ Completely viable to play Single-Player (But nowhere near as fun) - standing in for a Dwarf teammate is the floating robot companion Bosco, providing illumination, supplementary firepower, a limited number of revives for the player and most importantly, can mine minerals and dig tunnels for you.

+ Excellent synth-wave soundtrack that somehow fits perfectly.

+ Space Dwarves

+ The best player-base for a game I've been a part of. Had maybe 3 negative experiences with random players, and I've pretty much only played with random players.

+ Early-access done right - the game's received consistent support and major updates throughout this period, many of the additions and changes being guided by player-feedback. It feels like the game is made for you to have fun much more than the dev/publisher's profit.
The devs have committed to adding further content and continuing support post-release, and I see no reason not to believe them.

Room for improvement:
~ Variety in enemy-types. While the current roster is "good enough", it needs a few more additions to be fully fleshed-outl. #1 on my wishlist is a bug that can create tunnels of its own.
A new enemy faction (eg. evil cyborg space dwarves) would make for good DLC.

~ Variety in mission types. Again, "good enough", but the existing ones can get a little stale and more is always nice. Escort, territory control, extraction as some examples.

~ Deep Dives - a major feature introduced alongside Matrix Cores (as the main avenue for earning them), Deep Dives and Elite Deep Dives are a weekly pre-generated set of 3 missions each with 2 main objectives, strung together in a sequence with players' ammo and health carrying over between.
They're much less fun and rewarding yet more time-consuming than the regular missions. The only (gameplay) incentive for the player to participate in them, beyond novelty, is earning cores which are a big factor in late-game progression.

~ Weapon Overclock balance. Most are fine, but a significant number stand out as either incredibly overpowered, make the weapon plain worse, or are simply redundant.

~ Weapon/class balance in general. Some classes' capabilities are made largely redundant in the presence of others.

~ Perk Balance. Beastmaster is incredibly overpowered.

~ More difficulty-levels would be nice - Hazard 5 is currently the highest, but it's generally too easy with an experienced and cohesive team.

~ The current meta favours digging "bunkers" to fight off waves - forcing enemies through a single, linear chokepoint that they're practically incapable of overcoming - which is boring to me. The Oppressor enemy was added as a countermeasure, but it accomplishes little in disincentivising or mitigating the effectiveness of bunkers.

~ With pings greater than roughly 50ms, traversing terrain and especially using the grappling hook can be a crapshoot.


Bad:
- I've heard, but never experienced, that cheaters can essentially break the game for players they host for or join - unlocking everything for everyone they're lobbied with, giving them invulnerability and infinite ammo. To my knowledge this hasn't yet been resolved.