I recommend this game, but it has quite major flaws for longevity and I'll explain further about it later.

Let's start with the good: The campaign is great. The gameplay is all around phenomenal, and combined with the excellent animations, amazing locations, truly great character and enemy design, it all comes together to make a truly unique experience. The graphics are very demanding and my pc with a 3060, ryzen 5800x and 32gb ram struggles to keep this game consistently above 60 frames, but the gameplay does not suffer from having lower than 60 frames as is usually the case with other games and there are no frame dips or stutters. So even with a lower framerate the gameplay turns out to be very smooth, which is unexpected (This seems to be a particularly larger problem against the Chaos faction for me). The post-campaign game mode is also amazing, the classes are very good and the perk system that you unlock for both weapons and classes are very interesting ways to customize both your playstyle and the strengths and weaknesses you'd rather have. The different weapon versions within the same weapon type also offer a lot of variety that range from "it's there" to game changing. The missions are not quite as spectacular as the campaign ones but this is more than made up for with the difficulty increases that greatly affect how a mission turns out, certain missions also have certain random elements to aspects of their objectives which may make them harder or easier to complete that keeps things fresh. The monetization from the "battle passes" are entirely cosmetic and you can always buy the individual DLC if one or another chapter particularly interests you.

The way this game plays out after the campaign is very similar to games like Vermintide 2, Darktide or to a lesser degree Deep Rock Galactic. Where you'll be doing a set of missions over and over again while accumulating experience and levels on your classes and weapons which will allow you to tackle higher difficulties, and much like those games higher difficulties offer significantly better rewards. There is also a wave defense mode that I have not tackled quite as much due to it not progressing the cosmetic unlock line from your classes. Other than that, there are also daily/weekly versions of those missions with special modifiers (curated for weekly, random for daily) that allow you to get a special currency that you can use to buy versions of weapons that behave slightly differently from the base version while also being of the highest possible rarity for that weapon, they also allow you to buy some cosmetics. The game also has PVP but I haven't touched that nor I intend to.

With all of that out of the way, let's talk about the bad. It is not any one thing in particular, but how all of these systems end up interacting among themselves.

First off, you can level a class up to level 25, you start at level 1 and every level after that you'll unlock perks that you can use to both strengthen and customize your playstyle, there are 8 perk trees with 3 perk options each (totalizing 24) and you unlock it row by row. You can prestige after reaching level 25 up to four times which will give you a prestige perk, these range from helpful to borderline mandatory and you definitely want to have at least several of them. However, prestige will put you back at level 1 and take away all your perk unlocks. So if you're playing one class and want every unlock for it, it'll be a long time before you'll be able to play with the last few perks because you'll constantly be losing them in the next prestige. That's all not necessarily a bad thing, but just keep it in mind.

Second, weapons have rarities. You start at white rarity, then green, then purple, then yellow. The damage jump from white to yellow can be quite staggering, and since difficulty also scale enemy HP to as much as 400% of the value from the starting difficulty and their numbers and lethality far beyond that, you're kinda forced to be at a relatively high rarity (purple at the very least) to tackle difficulty 4 and on (where you'll be getting the requisite XP to not make this insufferable from each mission completion). This can be slightly mitigated by taking a weak weapon alongside a strong weapon or having perks in your class that increase your damage dealt (such as bullwark's shield bash 45% melee damage increase perk combo) but sometimes there are class-specific weapons which those classes tend to rely on to function optimally (sniper's sniper rifle, heavy's heavy guns), so going back to white rarity can be quite a pain point with how steep the damage increase is. You can get out of white rarity in 1 mission completion, but green rarity takes at minimum 3 mission completions (usually more) at difficulty 4 (didn't try higher than that), and that's just so obnoxious.

So all of this is not terrible per se, it just tells you that you should have a main class and focus on it. And while there are players out there like me who like to keep changing up we kinda have to suck it up because it's not really the developer's vision for the game. That's fine, kinda of. But here's where this issue gets really bad: You cannot have more than one of the same class in the same team, which, again, would be completely fine if all of the above didn't exist, since more than one of the same class would break the current balancing of the game I think. If at the very least weapon rarity didn't kill the potential it has to function at higher difficulties then this wouldn't be quite as terrible as it is but that isn't all. One of the negative modifiers you can get for the daily/weekly missions are the equivalent of "you can't play this class". (-50% health, -50% damage, can't block/parry). Which I guess means you need to have at least 2 main classes, which is also not ideal because more than once I've run into situations where both of those classes that I was leveling had already been picked in public games, since there are 6 classes in total. This also means that a lot of the time you'll be playing with people that don't even have their team perks unlocked (passive perk that benefit the whole team) which happens very often.

Two easy fixes could help with this: The first is to make you keep at least a select few perks inbetween prestiges, like your team perks. The other is to not make damage scale so steeply with rarities and instead make other QoL stats scale like accuracy and cleaving potential, you're already not having access to the whole perk tree of the weapon so having no damage on top of it just feels ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ awful.

If the operations game type is all you got from buying this game I would simply not recommend it because of all the drawbacks and artificial playtime increases it has, but the campaign is genuinely great and the operations game type itself is also excelently designed, it's just all the other systems that support it that are very unnecessarily frustrating (on top of being quite grindy). I don't mind the grind, but I do mind when there are systems purposely put in place to prevent me from doing it optimally so you can artificially inflate playtime numbers.

I recommend this game, but it has quite major flaws for longevity and I'll explain further about it later. Let's start with the good: The campaign is great. The gameplay is all around phenomenal, and combined with the excellent animations, amazing locations, truly great character and enemy design, it all comes together to make a truly unique experience. The graphics are very demanding and my pc with a 3060, ryzen 5800x and 32gb ram struggles to keep this game consistently above 60 frames, but the gameplay does not suffer from having lower than 60 frames as is usually the case with other games and there are no frame dips or stutters. So even with a lower framerate the gameplay turns out to be very smooth, which is unexpected (This seems to be a particularly larger problem against the Chaos faction for me). The post-campaign game mode is also amazing, the classes are very good and the perk system that you unlock for both weapons and classes are very interesting ways to customize both your playstyle and the strengths and weaknesses you'd rather have. The different weapon versions within the same weapon type also offer a lot of variety that range from "it's there" to game changing. The missions are not quite as spectacular as the campaign ones but this is more than made up for with the difficulty increases that greatly affect how a mission turns out, certain missions also have certain random elements to aspects of their objectives which may make them harder or easier to complete that keeps things fresh. The monetization from the "battle passes" are entirely cosmetic and you can always buy the individual DLC if one or another chapter particularly interests you. The way this game plays out after the campaign is very similar to games like Vermintide 2, Darktide or to a lesser degree Deep Rock Galactic. Where you'll be doing a set of missions over and over again while accumulating experience and levels on your classes and weapons which will allow you to tackle higher difficulties, and much like those games higher difficulties offer significantly better rewards. There is also a wave defense mode that I have not tackled quite as much due to it not progressing the cosmetic unlock line from your classes. Other than that, there are also daily/weekly versions of those missions with special modifiers (curated for weekly, random for daily) that allow you to get a special currency that you can use to buy versions of weapons that behave slightly differently from the base version while also being of the highest possible rarity for that weapon, they also allow you to buy some cosmetics. The game also has PVP but I haven't touched that nor I intend to. With all of that out of the way, let's talk about the bad. It is not any one thing in particular, but how all of these systems end up interacting among themselves. First off, you can level a class up to level 25, you start at level 1 and every level after that you'll unlock perks that you can use to both strengthen and customize your playstyle, there are 8 perk trees with 3 perk options each (totalizing 24) and you unlock it row by row. You can prestige after reaching level 25 up to four times which will give you a prestige perk, these range from helpful to borderline mandatory and you definitely want to have at least several of them. However, prestige will put you back at level 1 and take away all your perk unlocks. So if you're playing one class and want every unlock for it, it'll be a long time before you'll be able to play with the last few perks because you'll constantly be losing them in the next prestige. That's all not necessarily a bad thing, but just keep it in mind. Second, weapons have rarities. You start at white rarity, then green, then purple, then yellow. The damage jump from white to yellow can be quite staggering, and since difficulty also scale enemy HP to as much as 400% of the value from the starting difficulty and their numbers and lethality far beyond that, you're kinda forced to be at a relatively high rarity (purple at the very least) to tackle difficulty 4 and on (where you'll be getting the requisite XP to not make this insufferable from each mission completion). This can be slightly mitigated by taking a weak weapon alongside a strong weapon or having perks in your class that increase your damage dealt (such as bullwark's shield bash 45% melee damage increase perk combo) but sometimes there are class-specific weapons which those classes tend to rely on to function optimally (sniper's sniper rifle, heavy's heavy guns), so going back to white rarity can be quite a pain point with how steep the damage increase is. You can get out of white rarity in 1 mission completion, but green rarity takes at minimum 3 mission completions (usually more) at difficulty 4 (didn't try higher than that), and that's just so obnoxious. So all of this is not terrible per se, it just tells you that you should have a main class and focus on it. And while there are players out there like me who like to keep changing up we kinda have to suck it up because it's not really the developer's vision for the game. That's fine, kinda of. But here's where this issue gets really bad: You cannot have more than one of the same class in the same team, which, again, would be completely fine if all of the above didn't exist, since more than one of the same class would break the current balancing of the game I think. If at the very least weapon rarity didn't kill the potential it has to function at higher difficulties then this wouldn't be quite as terrible as it is but that isn't all. One of the negative modifiers you can get for the daily/weekly missions are the equivalent of "you can't play this class". (-50% health, -50% damage, can't block/parry). Which I guess means you need to have at least 2 main classes, which is also not ideal because more than once I've run into situations where both of those classes that I was leveling had already been picked in public games, since there are 6 classes in total. This also means that a lot of the time you'll be playing with people that don't even have their team perks unlocked (passive perk that benefit the whole team) which happens very often. Two easy fixes could help with this: The first is to make you keep at least a select few perks inbetween prestiges, like your team perks. The other is to not make damage scale so steeply with rarities and instead make other QoL stats scale like accuracy and cleaving potential, you're already not having access to the whole perk tree of the weapon so having no damage on top of it just feels fucking awful. If the operations game type is all you got from buying this game I would simply not recommend it because of all the drawbacks and artificial playtime increases it has, but the campaign is genuinely great and the operations game type itself is also excelently designed, it's just all the other systems that support it that are very unnecessarily frustrating (on top of being quite grindy). I don't mind the grind, but I do mind when there are systems purposely put in place to prevent me from doing it optimally so you can artificially inflate playtime numbers.