I particularly enjoy the player abilities, like the quick dash with WASD + Shift, the timestop if a projectile is about to hit me with that 1 minute cooldown, the doublejump, the enemy HP scanner, the entrynuke and reactive armor. Really cool features! These make the experience feel more about me having fun as a player, allowing the full freedom to go really fast and dodge projectiles like a champ, while also providing some conveniences to make the level-to-level gameplay flow feel really streamlined. These features make me feel like I can play this non-stop, with little friction getting in the way of momentum. I love that.
I also enjoy the theme and atmosphere, with how the player is framed as a corporate cybersoldier straight out of a cyberpunk movie, with megacorporations, augmented superhumans, advanced military tech and such. The CBI, the information that it contains and the stylization is really cool to me. The whole style of the mod is something I find really appealing overall.
Meanwhile, the metagame, upgrade system, shop and weapons are things I feel two-minded about.
With the metagame, I love the idea of my character doing contract work of mopping up levels from the demonic invasion, getting compensated (and implicitly rated on my performance by how thorough I was through the money I earn), yet the use for that money over the course of a megawad to get the same upgrades with each new playthrough is something that feel novel only on the first playthrough. After the first one, it begins to feel annoying and redundant. In my mind, I'm thinking "Welp, I'm on my 5th playthrough and I'm yet again getting the same upgrades over again that I would have preferred to have from the start. Gotta grind that money to get it. Meh."
With the guns, I love the infinite ammo for the regular weapons and limited ammo for the power weapons, I love how they have altfires, special abilities and how their functionality allows them to be useful in different situations, uniquely. I also like how the average powerlevel of weapons is double or triple that of vanilla default doom 2 weapons. This factor plays very nicely with the added movement abilities I get as a player to further reinforce the idea that I'm a badass megacorporation cybersoldier. Yet at the same time, the power of weapons, their altfires, ammo management, balance, visual consistency (how each weapon looks and feels compared to the others as a set) and the general usefulness when compared to each other seems out of whack. Some upgrades seem interesting at first, but often seem to be less efficient than their unupgraded variants. There is also a lack of a common standard to intuitively understand the power of a weapon, making it difficult to discern if a certain attack is more powerful at a glance. The enemy HP hud upgrade mitigates this somewhat, but vanilla weapons have this type of audiovisual<=>power standard consistency laid out more clearly. The roles of weapons also seem to overlap and contradict one another, with the gauss-shotgun being an excellent sniper weapon with a scope, moreso than the actual sniper rifle nor the combat rifle's burst mode.
With the hud, it works really smoothly, looks cool, but has some minor issues. I play on a 5:4 aspect ratio monitor, on 1024x768 resolution, so the Score gets obscured whenever I turn on the CBI. I need to switch back and forth to remember how much I have. Meanwhile, the Score is often a large number, making it tricky to discern quickly if I have 1000000 (one million) or 100000 (hundred thousand) of money at a glance. The BUY button's on/off state is alternating between a white and a faint grey, making it necessary to squint to determine if its actually available or not. If it were yellow when available, but greyed out when not, it would do wonders for user experience on that front. The scrollbar is also not fully obvious either at first glance. Making it stand out more would help new users to find it faster on their first go. It would also be useful if purchased/owned upgrades were color coded, to better give a faster overview of what I do have, what is active and what is offline and what has not yet been bought.
Overall, I like the mod. I have experienced two instances of the game freezing (requiring a ctrl-alt-del processkill), but other than that, it works smooth and plays well. One thing I don't get is the jetpack. No idea how to properly use that thing.
Personally, I'd want to see some a code of consistency and standard introduced to the weapons to more easily determine how powerful they are in relation to how they look, sound and feel when firing. I'd also want the upgrade system/shop to focus more on long-lasting consumable booster items/deployables/disposable superweapons, while introducing most of the current upgrades and purchases as standard issue equipment from the start. Lastly, I'd want to see the weapons have more defined roles. The revolver, sniper and laser shotty seem less effective than most other weapons, while the shotgun is an excellent all-range, all-situation gun that makes everything else feel underclassed. If all the other weapons could aspire to the shotgun of this mod, that'd be awesome.
Thank you again for making this mod, its really good!
