This games biggest issue is by far the weapon swap time. If they boosted that even just a bit the games quality would skyrocket.
Or, if swapping weapons just didn't leave you shieldless. I don't mind the slow weapon swap speed, but depriving you of your shield during it leaves you helpless.
I think I can confidently say its the weakest of the Nu-doom games, even with all the things I take issue with about Eternal.
I feel like TDA fixed some of the issues with Eternal, only to invent its own and then roundabout reinvent some of Eternal's.
As an example, they fixed having to disengage combat to go chainsaw an infinite-respawn fodder for ammo by adding melee weapons. Great! But then they removed meaningful health/armor generation other than low-health kills, so the safest recovery option is now to disengage combat to go kill an infinite-respawn fodder, but this time for health! Same issue, just for a different resource.
I think my biggest one overall though is that the game feels like a healthgate simulator, you either have enough health to healthgate, or you die from the next hit. You can't really build a health/armor stack, and the shield only blocks 2 hits before breaking if you use it to block un-parryable attacks.
It doesn't feel slower-paced than Eternal in the "stand-your-ground" way it was marketed, but instead you have similar enough tools that let you execute the same things differently. No dashes, but instead you can shield-charge or sprint-jump around to avoid attacks or engage/disengage. Combined with sprinting only working forwards, I feel like I'm doing the same things as Eternal, but with slower, jankier, and less direct inputs to achieve the same results. The only thing that really changed other than jankier inputs is spamming shield parries and no weapon switching (other than swaps forced by enemy armor/shield presence).
It's a fun game, but not one I wanted to replay right after beating (which I did with both 2016 and Eternal), or one that I ever want to play on Nightmare again (which I only play 2016/Eternal on).
The only video I ever watched of this guy was him answering criticisms of the Marauder. I get there was way too much crying about that enemy, but the way the game instructed you to fight it actually was counter productive and one of the worst ways to go about it.
The Marauder tutorial being abjectly wrong is probably the single worst part (for the general audience) about Eternal. All they had to do was fix the game's tutorial (which is otherwise correct/helpful for every other monster) misleading you by saying "Don't stand too close, don't stand too far away! Then attack when he flashes green!", with something more like "Stand far away until he shoots a red energy blast, dodge it, then he'll follow up with an attack that makes him flash green which lets you shoot him." I genuinely cannot believe they never patched those few lines of text. The game probably would have gone up 1-2 points overall on most reviews if those few lines of text were different.
