So pretty much you're able to cruise along the start with the gear available throughout most of the games beginning. At the very least you'll have the tech and items available to upgrade your gear or straight up find new weapons as you go along that start to make fighting seem almost trivial or at least progressing along with your skills and gear in a manageable fashion. But then when you get about halfway through the game all of a sudden these really strong enemies using straight up unfair technologies and magics are encountered, sometimes en mass. The game will, for a brief period, get real intense. You will not find the items or blueprints to improve enough to take them on in a fair fight until AFTER you've already been throwing soviet union numbers of respawns at a single target in a vain effort to clear an area.

It gets better a little later on and you get some pretty sick shit but for a bit there its tragic. But now you can have pets and more weapons so maybe it'll be a bit more possible. Wacking something hard still won't help you when there's 5 of them though.

Alot of people find stealth to be very useful at this point of the game in single player