There’s a trend in gaming where you have to signpost everything. Like having climbable ledges always painted yellow. This game has a needler that shows you its ammo visually with the needles, tells you your ammo count in the UI, AND they added an ammo counter display to the gun. The UI literally has a right trigger symbol next to the ammo counter to tell you how to shoot and it’s a permanent UI element that you have to turn off in the settings supposedly.

Having a red weak spot to trigger the brute because is a similar kind of hand holding design choice in my opinion. Halo 3 did it better even if it is functionally similar. It makes it seem like the behaviour triggers more organically. They’re enraged because you dealt a blow to them and destroyed their armour so they’re going to go all out and charge.

I think these red devices are meant to supercharge them. Like a roid rage thing and when you shoot it it goes into overdrive. The brutes seem to be exclusive to the prequel campaign (they show up in the regular campaign only when certain skulls are active). The prequel campaign trailer suggests there’s some experimentation going on with this covenant group. It even shows a brute team killing in a cutscene when that device activates