Eh, since we're already "Mixed" on release day I'll leave my review here, even though I'm less than 10 hours in. I bought this for multiplayer with friends, first and foremost. I played with one friend tonight and plan on playing with more when we're all online.

The way the character unlocks in multiplayer is a little odd. Whoever is the host, and therefore at the beginning of the campaign, has a limited number of unlocks - because it's the beginning of the game. Whoever joined that game, though, has a long list of available things to unlock - because it's not their game. Honestly this is the right way, because it allows people who are only going to play multiplayer to have full access to the game. These people exist, I have one friend who will only play this multiplayer - he'll never touch the campaign on his own.

The person hosting, then, is limited to some extent - but they're also unlocking and progressing in their campaign while everyone else who joined is not. They get to perform research, the missions they want, etc. It's a reasonable trade-off. I saw a dev comment they may add an option to allow everyone who joins to be at the same limited level as the host. This may be good for some people, but IMO only if that campaign progress ends up carrying over to all the players. Since there does seem to be static story missions (along with the random missions) if that mode allowed everyone to progress their story mission along with the host, that would be good. Otherwise it's fine just how it is.

As for the gameplay, it's fun. It's real time X-Com with a good number of elements and variables to make the game unique for each person who is playing. And, 8 player co-op!! This is huge and that alone makes this game fantastic.

We experienced no bugs tonight. The game ran well. Ultimately no complaints whatsoever. If things change as we play more I'll update the review.

People who have 1 hour gameplay and leave a negative review about "the amount of content" are tools.

I bought this game 2 days ago and I have 17 hours at the time of this review. Most of it in multiplayer. Since there is a lot of misunderstanding of what the coop actually is, I will try to explain that here concisely. I am recommending this game purely on its multiplayer, so do not consider the campaign as part of this review. It has its own interesting mechanics, but works mainly for 'solo' players.

The multiplayer really comes down to this:
The progression is split in 2 "characters". One of them is your campaign character and the other is your multiplayer character. Your multi-player character has access to all of the abilities and upgrades in the game. However, these are locked behind skill points that you need to grind for with xp. This also includes weapons and classes.

Now, the fun part. You can pick between 6 classes. Each class has a subtree in the skill tree for you to level. Each tree has several paths. You can mix and match any of the skills from that subtree on that class. Each tier of skills requires more points.

What all of this allows for is endless combinations of load outs with different strengths and weaknesses. On top of this you add on the in game ability upgrades. Now you have the same loadout, but every round you can level in a different priority.

Now, how does the multiplayer feel? I would say really good. It's challenging and fun. You can tune the difficulty perfectly for either harder or easier runs. These missions are not tied to your campaign, but are standalone.

I've had many 8 player lobbies. Squad composition matters a lot. Following the objective is also important. If you don't stay grouped you will most likely die. If you have friends just host a public lobby and then roll as a squad inside the game.

Sure you can help someone on their campaign, but they can do that alone for the most part. The fun part is coop with other players where you each have 1 character perfectly tailored to your play style.

Get it, it's worth for the multiplayer alone. Feel free to leave questions and I'll try to answer if you're debating getting this.

Red Solstice 2 is a prime example of why I don't trust Steam reviews anymore.

"It's a multiplayer-only game!"-- no it isn't, coming from someone who plays singleplayer only.
"This isn't a twin stick shooter, liars!"-- read the game's description, literally the first three lines.
"Only 400 players, game's dead!"-- let's forget about PlanetSide 2 and how it survived on similar numbers for nearly a decade, huh?
"It's filled with bugs!"-- I don't have a clue what people are doing as I yet have to find a bug on my end.
"Greedy devs, milking the community!"-- oh yes, an indie studio that made a game that is bashed for 'small player numbers' is now getting bashed once more! But this time for planting a clear indicator that the game will be supported for the next year or longer, which completely invalidates the previous argument-- how great. Truly a crime, what a bunch of greedy bas*ards they are for wanting to get their bills, employees and licences paid while they support a game with absolutely no in-game microtransactions, nor a AAA publisher to boot! Actual Satans I say.

Sarcasm aside, if you're thinking of getting RS2, do it. It's honestly worth it. It starts slow, but gets extremely hectic later on. It's that sort of game where it's a specific sort of experience you won't find anywhere else. Great theme, fluid and almost dynamic campaign against the clock and literal mountains of build customisation.
Yeah the game needs better UI, smarter bot AI and a longer soundtrack-- but for a long time now I didn't enjoy myself as much as I do with RS2. Honestly a mega-replayable long-haul blast of a game with a serious gritty character, but some humour sprinkled about. Only thing I'd really suggest to do is create a Sci-Fi ambient horror playlist on Spotify, turn off in-game music, and let it run in the background. Immersion skyrockets ten-folds.
Update 12/11/21: with that in mind here's a Sci-Fi ambient horror playlist I created for RS2. It's over 26 hour long and 221 tracks as of now, so it should last quite a while. 'Thought I would post to save anyone interested the trouble of manually creating one:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1cPSX0jTawRzh0WDIM4aZV?si=ec56f2bc22904119

But yeah, to close it off-- God, I hate people sometimes, honestly.

I'm writing this from a perspective of caring only about the single player campaign experience.

I had a good first impression of the game and tried to like it, but over the campaign progression the feeling switched to a mix of frustration and tedium - and I couldn't bother trying to complete it. The upside is that the developers seems to be pretty actively engaged, so perhaps in a year or so of patches and balance updates this will be enjoyable to play (I played on v1.2).

There's a diverse mix of bugs (AI bots pathing resulting in characters permanently stuck, order of equipped skills changed when loading a save, mission load screen reflecting the previous rather than the current mission, some XP progression achievements not being updated, etc..).

A lot of the mechanics are unclear or not explained at all, at both the strategic level and the tactical combat one. Spending half the campaign time flying from HQ to missions and back is rather silly.
And at some point the missions start throwing at you multiple boss type enemies at once (in addition to the regular waves of trash and medium enemies) which have huge health pools, resistance to at least 2 out of 3 damage types and silly high regeneration - while you have a task to hold some location for a minute or several. Maybe those can be handled with a team of 8 capable human players and diverse weapons and skills, but not a single player with 3 AI bots and limited ability to outfit and control them.

In itself, the game along with it's gameplay mechanic, it's ideas and everything else is amazing.
Graphics are good, the soundtrack and sound effects are good even if not truly memorable.

But Red Solstice 2 is such a mess... It's a grindfest with no end.
Leveling up just takes forever and there are many many many "skillpoints" to unlock technology, classes and whatnot knowing some unlocks can take 6 points and to reach that unlock, first you have to invest 15 points in the tree. I'm burned out of the game and it's grind.

Now, the gameplay is great but you'll quickly be overwhelmed by tons upon tons of monsters rushing at you from just every direction possible... Running for your life is the only thing you can do at some point.

And the worst is the capture mechanic which is great on paper but practically, it's just impossible !
The game ask you to capture a certain target which will be drowned in the mass of monster, so you place a trap to capture the monster you want but you get to capture another one which stepped first on the trap.

The difficulty is just bonkers and your team can easily get wiped out by playing in normal difficulty.
The ranking system ask you to complete missions which are annoying and terribly complicated to succeed.

I really don't know what went through the devs head... They created a game which isn't a MMO but needs to be grinded like one. If you want to progress, you really have to spend hours upon hours on the game and dedicate your time on it as if you were starting to play a MMO.
And missions often takes too much time to complete without any possibility to save and continue later.

All this is pretty sad because the game looks great, plays great, has tons of great ideas and makes you want to explore it but is ultimately tarnished by frustrating mechanics and a story which seems to throws new characters at you without introducing them or the faction they belongs to.

This game is largely reminiscent of an old WarCraft III custom game I used to play (one with little soldiers running around a city shooting lots of zombies), and it has a nice feel to it.

Pros: Simple controls, visceral art style, good level of character customization, engaging loop, encouraging of co-op (up to 8 people), lovely effects, decent selection of weapons, good sound mixing for different weapons and skills

Cons: Lack of real soundtrack, lack of enemy variety, primary gameplay idea may not be ideal to some (might get stale quick going from point to point and shooting stuff)

Honestly, if you have a few friends and you feel like slaughtering mutants on mars while mocking each other relentlessly for your awful builds or getting pissed at your one friend who plays medic but still hordes all the ammo, this game is pretty good. They added a new class and it was free (surprising for most games nowadays) so I'm hopeful they'll add more, but I'm enjoying it and probably will for awhile yet.

This game released in a state not too unfamiliar with modern gaming standards, which isn't great, but when a development team is in touch with its playerbase as closely as this development team is the bugs are handled quickly and suggestions are taken willingly. If you use the game's main menu to join their discord you can simply go to the appropriate channel and describe your bug and a developer will tell you whether or not they were aware of it and if they were already aware of it they will tell you if and when they fix it. That isn't something you see from most modern development teams, the communication is top notch and it shows as a few days after the game released there have been two major updates that tackled a lot of the problems that people reported in the development chat and the suggestions thread that is available is flowing with ideas that are at least being considered and some I know have been implemented or at least have been confirmed as planned.

Respect needs to be given and while the non-saved campaign progression may be an off switch for some people, I for one enjoy the fact that I can choose to join people who are playing their own campaign without boosting my characters level or stats so high that my own game becomes a boring, disingenuous version of the one I played with my friends/strangers. And even still, the levels you gain in skirmish mode as they call it, the coop game mode, carries over to your profile which shares similar unlocks with the single player campaign, so it is not as if your time is wasted, you just simply have the choice of investing the multiplayer experience into your multiplayer character, or the shared singleplayer and multiplayer options, which is your Combat Suit and Squad sections.

My advice, try the game out, give it a shot and don't think because the objective is simply "go here and do this" that the game is boring. The difficulty of the game isn't the objectives, it is attempting to accomplish said objectives without running into a horde or large swarms of mutations that call for squads to put their heads together and move together, sometimes pushing through the opposition and other times kiting away from them as best as possible while you whittle down the numbers. A simple straight road to an objective has never been so complicated and I applaud the developers for taking such a simple objective system and making it a lot more challenging than most people give credit. It gives this oddly "repetitive" gameplay as I've seen it described play as something that is far from it. Sure, there are the same side missions and main missions in Skirmish mode, an unlimited mission selection would be nigh impossible, but the scant variety we have is complimented by the variety of enemies, variety of player classes, weapons, abilities, builds, strengths, and weaknesses which all lead to every single game being played completely different. Perhaps you have a DPS heavy team that laughs in the face of hordes but lacks the single target damage to combat most of the larger mutations, or perhaps the opposite is true and the hordes of trash mobs will eventually overwhelm the group causing for a panicked scatter from uncoordinated teammates.

This is not a game that should be played on easy and then reviewed, the game only gets better with higher difficulties and more challenges. Any reviews that you see that say the game is "too easy" have never played the game on the harder difficulties, which can only be unlocked by getting total victories on the easier difficulties. The game starts you off with three to four difficulties, with the option of unlocking harder ones.

I do not recommend games often, but I can't help but feel that people simply hate on a game for a system that they themselves find lacking but don't look at the entire game as a whole and weight it fairly. Should I not recommend Red Solstice 2: Survivors simply because I prefer to play games like D&D and they don't have fireball? No? Obviously, because this game wasn't built with that concept in mind so giving it an F because the criteria you weight it to isn't the vision of the game is spiteful.

The best 3rd-person-iso-realtime-action-campaign-cooperative-shooter of the last decade in my opinion, very addictive...

Pro:
- mars colony setting
- visit and claim areas on the whole planet (like in XCom visiting continents on earth)
- operation ship inspired by Xcom, great adaption of moving on the planet map like in Xcom
- Great atmosphere
* very detailed graphics which absolutely support the setting of lost colonies/cities
* music is very good at supporting the pressure, the combat action, the unknown, the hordes of mutants, the darkness...)
* Apart from all the other missions types there are story missions and different NPCs that add to the atmosphere

- unbelievable number of:
* different enemy mutant types
* weapons, armor modules, mods and upgrades
* items usable in combat - all make sense, can be gathered during a mission, are crucial for survival

Good replay-value because of:
- many different primary mission types, in addition randomly seeded different submissions, random spawning points
- Very extended research tree
- a lot of different soldier classes which can be upgraded, modded and improved in a lot of different aspects

Contra:
- some missions can get frustrating because of:
- not being able to reach mission objective in time or before being overrun (especially if high infestation levels or HUNTER) because not having/finding explosives for blast doors and not finding any door switches or power stations

Overall:
- runs smooth on both my Pcs (GTX1070, RTX, both have SSDs and modern CPUs - some reviewers are complaining about loading times - well, they probably have no SSD but mechanical HDD...)
- graphics and sounds are superb, as well as the weapon effects and the destruction of the environment
- no bugs and no crashes so far - even with all graphic and sound configurations set to highest quality on 4k Resolution

I ABSOLUTELY RECOMMEND this game for all who love constant weapon action, exciting science fiction settings (Mars, cities/colonies in darkness, hordes of enemies, challenging missions, choice of cooperative or single player game play, important decisions about the next research branch or usage of (always too low) supplies...I think I stop here, you get the idea :)

I've completed the campaign on Very Hard difficulty and the achievement didn't pop... Save often as I did experience a crash and lost my progress at one point.

The mechanics of this game are fun, but it's way too reliant on co-op elements to be worth the effort. People who want to play solo should absolutely be allowed to take 7 AI bots in order to complete the tougher infestation missions.

Completing global objectives and unlocking research items are similar to XCOM, but Red Solstice 2 lacks the same polish to make it as engaging. There are too many balancing issues and random moments that can ruin your experience.

Consider me a little biased because of my old days with Warcraft 3 custom maps like Night of the Dead, SWAT, and Undead Assault, but this completely scratches that itch. A great evolution from a custom Warcraft 3 map to a fully-fledged game!