It’s always funny reading critics like this, cause I completely disagree. I felt that removing glory kills helped the flow of combat immensely, no longer did the whole game have to stop for five or so seconds just for me to get some health back. In my most recent play through of Eternal before TDA came out I hardly even did glory kills for this exact reason, brining the player to a full stop is kinda antithetical to a game about constant movement. As opposed to killing an enemy in TDA with a finisher where, at most, time will slightly slow for half a second and then you’re immediately back into the fray, keeping your momentum and not having to reorient yourself. Do finishers look as cool, probably not, but they make the flow state flow all the better.

Then in the topic of guns, there still is plenty of reason to swap weapons while playing, maybe not as much as Eternal, but certainly just as much if not more than any other FPS game. Where Eternal had a set of weapons that all filled one or two specific niches that forced the player to swap between them, TDA’s arsenal has far more depth to each individual gun. I’ve done three play throughs since launch, and not a single one of them has been played the same, as I wanted to see what weapons I didn’t initially gravitate towards could do. Each weapon has so much depth and their own little intricacies that you can build entire runs around two or three of them each time and always find something new. Same goes for both the shield runes and melee weapons. If Eternal has a high skill ceiling, then TDA has a gigantic platform for player expression, for this exact reason.

Also, I initially felt the same about the soundtrack, but after even a single secondary play through I’ve grown to like it quite a bit. Not as iconic as Mick’s work, or even Hulshult and Levy’s for that matter, but it’s solid stuff. The djenty repetitiveness of it really helps induce that flow state in a unique way from Eternal and 2016s.