I'm not totally feeling Trepang2 as a mechanical successor to FEAR. It's inspired by it, but FEAR combat was a lot more... free form? Which might sound crazy but the Trepang2 combat seems also influenced by Doom Eternal where you kinda have to cycle through weapons rapidly, you have to use your abilities basically all the time, and enemies move around so much that it just turns into a bunch of 1v2 encounters for like 2 minutes per room. It ends up making the combat feel repetitive when you don't have as much control over it yourself (this is also why I refunded Doom Eternal when it first came out, the combat was just really boring because it's basically a non-stop scripted QTE). Also the weapon drops are affected by grenades / physics which leads to situations I've had twice, already, of literally running around in circles looking at the floor trying to find something to pick up because I'm out of ammo again.
It's not a bad game, exactly, but I have 4 hours in and not sure the combat has much life left in it. And of course like most games, higher difficulty doesn't mean "harder", it means "a bunch of tactics aren't viable anymore".
On a different note, I had stopped playing Brotato months and months ago and the patches have sorted out mostly every complaint about it I had. It's much more balanced, they added weight to the shop instead of being true RNG so you can actually try to make certain builds now, etc. It was OK for a little while initially but now just seems great.
Edit: Didn't actually buy any more sale things after my initial share. I did buy BG3 and Cities Skylines 2 though, hopefully not burned this time.
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