• Jet Lifter feels really good. It's nice to not have to worry about balancing weapon usage with jetpack usage.
  
• It's going to be really hard to go back to collecting armor boxes after being able to buy HP increases (that are universal across classes!).
  
• Weapon drops are 'automatic' in that they're linked to progression (although you can break the curve a bit if you are obsessive about collecting all of the MIA drones).
  
• Buildings collapse and break real good, even if using non-explosive weapons.
  
• The Prowl Rider.
  
• No more weird gender-specific classes! Women can wear giant armored suits and Spiderman throughout the city just as well as men can, so now they're able to!
  
• Speaking of gender, a big toning down of the weird, impractical outfits (at least at the outset) for women. My wife and I gave each other the 'really?' look when we saw what passed for lower-body armor for the EDF 5 Wing Diver (although if that is your thing, you can still eventually acquire a short skirt for female characters and there are boob physics).
  
• Customizing your character beyond colors! This is actually super cool and good, and I wish the mainline EDF games will take note of this and allow us more customization beyond picking a color scheme that makes other players' eyeballs bleed.
  
• Turning mines/turrets/hand grenades into cross-class deployables. I always felt like taking one along as a weapon in an EDF game was a real gamble and didn't feel nearly as fun as bringing a fully-fledged weapon as they are more supporting weapons than anything.
  
• Controlling vehicles. I need to play around with the helicopter equivalents, but it's nice to feel like I am not riding the edge of dying due to a control/physics error every time I get behind the wheel of a vehicle (although I would love it if there was a motorcycle in the game that feels like the typical EDF motorcycle in that it is barely usable, but capable of getting the game to do all of its weird physics jank).
  
• The new weapon attributes are cool - I like how explicit they are that certain weapons do certain things and that there are actual status effects beyond death (like being on fire and being shocked by an electrical weapon). Some long-reload weapons get a quick-reload option (which is a cool bonus), some weapons get bonuses for holding down the trigger for a long period of time (it is always cool to get bonuses for something you want to do), and some weapons can even change type (e.g., rocket launcher, shotgun) depending on how you charge it. I can see this becoming very bad very fast, though, if they indulge in this too much.
  
• SWORDS. Swords never felt right in mainline EDF games (they were exclusive to the Fencer, they felt slow, and they were often too weak to compete with other weapons at the same level). They feel appropriately anime in Iron Rain.
  

• The Ranger analogue (the first class you play as) is just straight up bad compared to the mainline Ranger. You have a short range dodge that doesn't carry your momentum forward that you can only use a limited number of times in succession? Whereas playing Jet Lifter felt a bit liberating compared to the Wing Diver, playing as the nu-Ranger feels so much worse than the standard EDF Ranger (despite nu-Ranger wearing an exoskeleton).
  
• Weapons feel... weird. They don't feel like they have the same punch or carry the same visceral impact that weapons in standard EDF games do. Landing a big shot with an explosive weapon in EDF is rewarding because of the big explosion and the other big explosions of blood, bug parts, and physics that result. Iron Rain weapons just have a big explosion and it's hard to tell just how many you actually killed because the secondary explosions just aren't there/aren't as big.
  
• The fact that weapons are uniform no matter what exoskeleton/frame/class you use does kill some of the lovably weird uniqueness that classes in standard EDF games have. Because the Fencer is more or less a mech suit, you can give them weapons that are highly impractical like the big gently caress-off cannons that would be far-fetched for a man wearing a simple armored vest to wield.
  
• All. The. Staggering. Practically any enemy hit is going to make you stagger, which has a lot of really bad effects. One, it disrupts that flow of carnage (which is something the mainline EDF games do really well). Two, it sets you up to getting chain-staggered/stunlocked (which can kill you really fast). Three, it interrupts anything you're doing, from using items to receiving the 'keep holding the trigger' effects that a lot of weapons have in this game. All in all, it just feels very anti-fun.
  
• The overall tone and feel of the game doesn't have the same level of camp that really helps define EDF. It's definitely much better put together than a regular EDF game, but part of the charm of EDF is how all of the different unintended consequences of its systems somehow work together to create this lovable jankiness that's topped by a story that never takes itself seriously. Case in point - the random mooks that accompany you in missions. In a standard EDF game, maybe one of them has a personality with a unique voice, while the rest of them are just NPCs that will call out random lines and respond to those call outs randomly (with some of them taking cues from the player and singing the EDF song when prompted). In Iron Rain, they try to give a ton of them different voices and personalities, but because there are so many you wind up caring about precisely none of them.
  
• Enemies that hard counter specific weapon damage types. In a game with limited loadouts, it is extremely bad design to punish specific weapon types without clearly signaling that these hard counters are going to be present. Say I love the laser/energy weapons - the first time I encounter silver ants, I have no idea that they're hard counters to these weapons. But then I try to shoot them and the NPCs are like 'oh yeah, these guys deflect energy weapons'. Now I'm screwed (I can't do enough damage to them) and I'm being punished for using weapons that I like. It's not very fun.
  

• Vehicle support: It's cool that everyone can take them along and they feel suitably powerful, but the sheer cost of deploying them (and the fact that you only get one) makes them feel like they are things you shouldn't use unless it's an emergency (and when it is an emergency, you'll probably be dead by the time the vehicle actually gets there).
  
• The MIA drones. It's cool that these are here and there are unlocks associated with them, but locating them in the huge levels is a really dumb scavenger hunt (especially because some of them are located in tents where you can't actually see them - you only know if they're there if you get the prompt to pick them up).
  

LuiCypher fucked around with this message at 16:18 on Jul 3, 2019

• They somehow made aerial vehicles control worse than in EDF 4/5. I didn't think this was possible.
  
• The cost of new weapons is OK for low E/D rank weapons, but the bullshit costs really ramp up once you hit C rank and above.
  
• I do like that you have a limited number of respawns in MP games that are not reliant on a player coming to revive your butt. This is really great, as the last player standing is often getting mobbed and has a difficult time trying to make it to players' bodies to resurrect them. On top of that, they really did a good job encouraging players to resurrect each other by having player rezzes not deduct from the number of 'free' respawns and making the resurrection items really cheap to buy/use/insert into your item loadout. Plus, it will no longer cost you your own health to resurrect players.
  
• I love the Heavy Striker's shield ability. It can block a surprising number of things (including some physical ram attacks) and the duration the shield lasts isn't affected by anything like number of hits blocked/damage prevented - just time.
  
• Stunlocking is a real thing enemies do to you at higher difficulty levels, and it's a dumb way to make things more difficult especially because basic ants can make you ragdoll/stunlock you - in other words, pretty much everything in the game can toss your around like a ragdoll, which is just bad design. Overdrive is your best way of breaking out of a stunlocking situation, but you typically can only do it once per mission so you better kill everything that can stunlock you and hope the mission doesn't throw another wave of enemies that can do it once you're done.
  
• If you beat the game on Normal, you're actually very well-tuned to go through from the beginning at the Hardest difficulty level, so do that instead of rolling through on Hard because you'll unlock everything for both Hardest and Hard at the same time.
  

LuiCypher fucked around with this message at 18:57 on Jul 8, 2019

LuiCypher fucked around with this message at 16:00 on Jul 21, 2019