After playing the game for a while some of my previously made points were indeed made moot, but of course first impressions are first impressions and one should always bear that in mind. After finishing the game and I will still say I have by no means tested it extensivelly here are my thoughts on it.
Money is still a problem at the beggining, even with mercantile it do is a problem. Now granted, the problem solves itself once you start investigating Depot A, but that is already the end of the available game and again, I had a lot in mercantile. I was also going down mainly on psionics and crossbows which are about the most inexpenive way to go. My sugestion here is to slightly lower prices all across the board and especially lower them on ammo. I was able to aford ammo cause I played with a crossbow, if I was using any other gun for which ammo is more expensive I'd probably be hurting.
Starting enemies are too tough.. Well, honestly not that tough, the may problem is the starting armor being increadibly bad. It's not that it isn't doable but the beggining is kill a pack of enemies or two at best and then go back for free healing. I feel it would seriously improve the starting if the character started with an armor that had hade 20%/4 mechanical. Eventually you get one, even if by the end of that mission without paying for one but doing the mission is just a pain in the ass with all the going back and forth just to save money. This wouldn't really affect the game that much, just make the start less of a go back pain in the ass especially with the timer on the double doors lol.
Cooldowns need to be toned down a little bit. I can understand game balance preventing grenade toss after grenade toss but please do tone down the cooldown on the health hypo. So many times the amount of damage bing thrown at you requires more use or just spending 3 hours trying to get the perfect start for a fight and being lucky enough to get too many attacks in a round.
Saving in combat. Please, for the love of everything that is dear to you. Let me save at least at the very first round of combat. How many times I forgot to save for a while and tehn combat comes in, I realise that if I don't pull it right I'll have to go back a lot! Either that or have an auto-save everytime you enter a new instance.
Everything is too weak when compared to psionics. I don't know if this is intended but quite frankly with Psionics alone I can deal with everything, even if that doesn't always makes it easy. Psionics only make things easy on one vs one fights or agaisnt 2 guys. Most situations it's still planning and adapting. However if you opt for a non psionic weapons won't do. Now I dunno if others managed to ever do it without psionics but I honestly can't, unless I'm being able to stun a lot of people, deal a massive amount of damage across multiple enemies and such, many battles seam to be impossible. For example dealing with the burrowers without psioncs at the GMS? Nope, not a chance in hell. With psionics it's possible but it requires fighting by the entrance and exiting and entering in combat. Still the difference is from completly impossible to barelly doable... As for the mutants in depot A. Somehow I doubt that I'd be able to get through that without psionics. The way to deal with this would be to buff weapons slightly and make much better abillities for weapons to put the at the level of psionics or perhaps learned abillities for the weapons like you do on psionics.
Range on weapons still seam to be incredibly bad. just a few squares away it's already a massive accuracy loss, only the sniper seams to be able to deal with that problem but it shouldn't even be that problematic. Now I belive that the problem here is the scaling of the weapon's skills. You can keep on raising but it barelly has any effect at all. Raising the scale would possibly fix this.
The thing I explored least was crafting. I do know that crafting will allow me to get better stuff than I normally find in shops, the problem is aquiring the materials early on. Cause you need to be lucky on drops or find them for sale and most of the ties materials are incredibly expensive for early game. Another problem that arises is that many craftables require 2 different types of crafting skills which can be quite problematic to say the least. I'm not sure how to solve this to be quite honest. Saying that all mats should be avialable and cheaper could very adversly affect the economy of the game so I can't offer a real solution here but something should be done to make crafting viable early rather than something you'll only be able to start dipping into after 10 or 15 hours into the game.
