Is the game finally fun?

[cheshire.panther]

I played it on release but put it on hold cause it felt slow, lethargic and barely having any interesting content compared to S1. Is it worth playing nowadays?

[enge]

It's less lethargic, but doesn't pop like S1 did. Never will, most likely - it's simply not the direction devs are taking it in. If you liked S1, you stick with S1.

[BlackjackGT]

To be one of those semantic nerds, Early Access launch is the 1.0 "release" version whenever that happens.

I've had plenty of fun with it, esp. now that online co-op *mostly, most of the time* works.

Some of my early consistent S2 feedback was:
-Maps too large/sprawling, resulting in too much "dead space" between enemy encounters. This seemed to be cause they designed the maps for co-op, but even in co-op you end up with dead time on certain maps. They've alleviated this a bit by putting barrels/closed doors etc. to block off certain areas and make maps feel smaller; I just felt like that was a Band-Aid and still didn't make maps have S1's feel of "channeling" the players into battles smoothy (think S1's Military Floors).

-Too many enemies are just placed in little corners and gaps, staring at the wall/corner, waiting for the player's presence to "activate" them. I didn't feel like S1 felt that way. And some games I play that do this find a way to sort of "hide" this from the player.

-Which results in too much of an MMORPG feeling where these "dead" mobs (groups of like 2-4 enemies) are just waiting for the player's presence in preset spots on a map. Maybe I'm too much Helldivers' fan but part of the fun there was enemies patrolling to try to find you. S2 did finally add an occasional "roving patrol," but it's not really a major part of S2.

-I still feel like with a couple exceptions, the boss battles just aren't as fun to me as the basic levels in S2. The whole finale goes on and on and on and on to the point of tedium. I have great fun with some of the mid levels/maps. When I reach the finale, the never ending end levels and mega boss I just don't much enjoy. I think sometimes solo I just quit the game instead of doing that. :) In co-op I always get mauled and end up watching the other players() finish, but I guess I was like that in S1 too.

All this said I've got 203 hours in S2 and wasted oh probably some months of my life on now largely outdated Steam game guides for it. So I have affection for it and have had a lot of fun. I don't know if I love S2 quite the way I did S1. I think given it's a larger dev team, a different game engine and a different viewpoint (isometric), it's hard to complain if it doesn't exactly recapture S1's "magic."

[sev]

s2 is definitely fun now and they really improved it since beta launch, but it's still missing some things and there are still some bugs. the most impactful and interesting difference to s1 is definitely the additional classes and the more dynamic class mechanics. and as for lethargy, base movespeed is much much much faster now, and there are lots of movespeed increasing mechanics now that really let you nyoom. there's lots of new makes and attachments for weapons that keep things fresh, and the manual item active/passive system is really cool.

however, there are still an incredibly small number of items compared to s1 and the weapon pool is equally small. the multiplayer is pretty broken too, right now lobbies arent visible in the browser and matchmaking is very slow.

the devs have made it very clear that s1 is not in a state they wanted it to be and they had to cut a lot of corners/implement features differently than they'd liked, so I don't expect s2 to be as good as s1. s2 is a different game and will probably grow more different as it continues to develop. but in terms of it being interesting compared to s1, I would argue that is definitely true now. it's both more like s1 now than when it launched, but has enough unique content to warrant a play.