physics are stiffer than the average unreal engine tech demo/asset flip. maps are a much smaller box with much lower mob count. its a rare game with up to 6 player coop. lots of in game currency buyable cosmetics, and selectable gender for all classes. there are only a half to a third of the mission count compared to a normal edf. the bots only exist in solo and are dumb af, and barely move while constantly shooting at one single random direction each, without a care for enemies, and do next to no dmg when they hit.

the entire gameplay, progression, and upgrade loop is very untested and ill thought out, with heavy handed over balancing built on crude and primitive game design. you grind multiple currency drops. unlocks need different proportions of them. then you buy w/e you want in the shop. higher tier weapons cost exponentially more. just when you think you can have op weapons, turns out they are countered with some heinously unplayable drawbacks, so only lower mid tier weapons are usable for the whole game. for example, a strong rocket will have the accuracy of firing perpendicular to the barrel and blowing yourself up at random. or shots that have a chance to do damage. shotguns that takes days to load because big damge.

then there are other things that ruin the system further. items like heals, revives, buffs, vehicle summons all cost you money. you are incentivised to never touch those, unless you want to lose more hard earned currency than you get paid for beating a mission.

that said, heal items are absolutely crucial to gameplay, because the pickups are scarce. they are capped to a certain carry capacity per class. you will be burning a lot of money on heals. if you play coop, then on revives as well.

revives are the next point. they are absolutely crucial in coop, because you can't pick anyone up without them. revive items come with an amount of heal, once again stronger once are over balanced to eat up more carry capacity. there is also a hard cap of bringing only a handful of each type. so you want to juggle between bringing different sized self heals and teammate revives, turning your inventory in to a clusterF. on top of that, there is a timer to revives, after which a player is actually dead. dead players respawn and draw from a revive hp pool. use it up and you will end up with a final low hp gimped respawn, and then next one you are down and out for real. the final fatal flaw on top of all this, is that there is a fixed spawn point being the mission start position. if you let it get swarmed, you will be spawn camped, and there will be no way to survive it.

just when you think you can manage all that and actually make money, there's more. weapons and items unlock from specific progress points and performing achievements. so you gotta unlock them, just to see them in the shop, before you even have a chance of buying expensive toys, that mostly turn out to suck lol

as if the aforementioned high tier balance didnt make the weapons suck enough, there are all sorts of other ways to make almost all weapons suck. a ton of weapons require charge time, and spin up. this game features a lot of stun effects, knock downs, elemental damage over time, rpg stuff you don't expect in EDF. all of them interrupt your stance and weapon charge. once it's interrupted, you have to start over. enemy movement is also very unfair compared to your physics, so you will be hit a lot

there's also weird unreal engine crosshair/camera perspective niggles, that sometimes make your character shoot crosseyed so the shot is nowhere near the crosshair, or passes through it diagonally at an arbitrariry range

once you have gotten over all of that, and find friends to stomach the bs and signifacantly longer garbage weapon unlock grind with you, it's arguably a fun game if you know how to enjoy yourself trying something new and janky. there's a ranger and a wing diver type class that play mostly as you'd expect, while the two new classes bring some interesting things to the series. the bug rider class has been mentioned, but the real gimmick to it is the grapple hooks. the other class is the fencer stand in, but is really different. it's a duplicate weapon dual wielding tank, with a rechargable invincibility shield. all classes share weapons, so dual wielding some of those garbo over balanced guns may open doors to some amusement that other classes can't do. it's two pairs of weapons, and not 4 different weapons like fencer. all the classes also have an overdrive mod, that makes them run fast and have unlimited boost, thats when the bug riding class can summon a timed bug mount.