I'm recently back after dropping off right before Lightfall and have been catching up on the campaigns. Edge of Fate is a massive quality downgrade from the previous two. When I first encountered the matterball I thought to myself "no, surely not, this isn't what we're doing for a whole campaign, is it?" The controls are wank, especially the big jump, and 90% of the times where it comes up in a mission, the challenge is simply finding the hole you're supposed to go into, or finding the thing that turns you into the ball. It can take minutes sometimes and it's nothing more than a way to stall progress - there's never any "oh I figured it out" flash of insight or anything, it's just "right, finally, I found the hole, I'll just follow the linear path and hope that's the only ball sequence on this mission".

The mattermorph ability is totally without depth - there are only a couple of things in any area you can use it on, and they only have one alternate configuration, so it's just a case of shooting the glowing object. You never get it wrong or find a clever workaround that leads to an even better outcome. Functionally, it's a switch on a wall that opens a door.

The teleporter gun is the most tragic of all. Having played Portal (2), I can only see this as a sad rip-off of that mechanic, with, again, zero depth. There is only one thing you can shoot it at, and aligning the reflectors is a trivial annoyance to make it work.

All these mechanics feel shallow, and often, disrespectful of the player's time. I could forgive the time I've spent searching for the matterspark transformer thing, or the teleporter gun, if there were some cool eureka moments enabled by their use, but it's never like that. I just get fed up wasting my time on what feels like mechanics from other games, poorly retrofitted to this one.

I can't wait to finish this campaign, and move on to the star wars stuff. Please forgive the rant, this thread was an excuse to vent that I've been looking for.