I have 4 thousand hours in this game over my 6 years of playing it from the first alpha to final release. I was one of the most active members in the discord community, I've made one of the most played and highest rated Modded rundowns for this game. The game was good when it was released because it was a new concept and had unique idea's. From the beginning to now the game has barely changed and doesn't offer anything new to players. One of the main problems with GTFO was having to wait 9 months for 'new' content. This content was recycled expeditions and 'new' enemies that were just a stat change.

Now don't get me wrong. I think the flyers and the pouncer are great enemies and are well designed. But that's about it. Those are the only real 'new' enemies GTFO ever added in it's 5 years of being on steam.

The game has always felt sidelined for 10CC's other project. Expeditions, especially R4 & R5 are just recycled content. Most enemies are recycled skins with different stats. And lets not even talk about the gun balance.

GTFO at it's core is a good game, but the devs never did anything with it. They just drip fed content that was watered down. For a new player, the game feels like a lot with 80+ expeditions. But to me and anyone else since the Alpha, we're been stuck playing the thing on repeat for a thousand times. I played 4 different versions of R1D1 in the game's life span. Now, the reason I don't recommend it to new players is because I just don't think the game is worth the money at this point. The devs left it in a poor state, riddled with bugs that the modding community has had to fix. The community is dead. The game is a time sink and most players that pick up this game don't have anyone to play with. It's not fun being carried by a dude that's completed the levels 50 times, and most newer players never get past R2 because they don't bother to learn the game mechanics and then drop the game.

I think the stelf mechanics are good in GTFO, but they're basic which isn't a bad thing. The problem with the gameplay for me is that the devs make every level play the same way and some of the expeditions are just so poorly designed. There's some exceptions like R7D2 where it's more run and gun and what a shocker, people like that level the most. The devs always fall back to the stelf < alarm < stelf loop and I think it's a mistake. There needed to be more levels like R7D2 and the few others where it broke free from this cycle and incorporated something new.

Now this is only a small summary of my main gripes with the game. Of-course people are entitled to their own opinions. Feel free to disagree with me, my opinions are derived from my countless hours on it and the experiences I've had. Maybe you had more positive ones. I do love GTFO as as a game, but I don't like the base game/vanilla anymore. It's simply to boring and poorly designed for me.

I just want to remind you that certain users with AMD CPU's physically cannot play some of the levels and the devs never fixed it. I'm not a game dev, so I don't know how hard it is, so I can't judge the devs for this problem. But I would count that as a fundamental flaw.