Have been playing this for a few days. I loved DS1 and DS2. Some thoughts:
- The autosave is fucking dumb and on the border of being broken. As mentioned above, quitting the game even right after "Saving Progress" and coming back might kick you back to like at least 5 min of gameplay. Good luck fighting those hordes again.
- The DS3 is even less scary than DS2. Well, I can't completely blame the game design. In the game's setting wise, Isaac has fucking went through Necromorph shit for years, building and blowing up whole markers, killing several leviathan class Necromorphs, etc, so it's perfectly understandable the game world becomes more popamole for him - just another Necromorph dismembering Friday. Player wise, I've went through DS1, DS2, the DS shooter of Wii, so killing Necromorphs and preparing for ambushes isn't really different from killing random soldiers in Planetside 2 for me. On the other hand, if you play DS3 like DOOM3, the game is surprisingly fun.
- Game difficulty is still very high, on Hard. Isaac is hardier this time but I had to eat a lot of medipacks. Universal ammo is...well, dumbed down of course.
- The new weapon combination system is fun and actually critical to gameplay. Despite that Isaac is way more tougher than ever, this time you have only two weapon slots, and shooting and reloading is still slow as fuck, so building the favourite weapon combinations to use is much more critical than, say, using nodes strategically to empower your weapons. Of course, you may argue that this is exactly how Blizzard ruined Diablo 3, by forcing the player to use limited offensive ability slots, and making the choice of abilities costless...
- The character interaction this time is very facepalm worthy. It feels like all the characters' are from Twilight. The only cool guy is Carver but I can't get all his story because I don't play co-op.
- Haven't beaten the game yet, only got to around 65%, so no comment on the end game design. But I do admit the Lovecraftian atmosphere on Tau Volantis is very well done. But there's way too many copy & pasting here and there.