> You can hide behind cover and headshot everyone with the sniper rifle on hard 10-15 levels above you can kill everyone with one shot.
to be fair, this is an issue with pretty much every rpg-ish fps. if you're good at aiming, deus ex is also really easy with a sniper rifle or assault rifle with max damage upgrades. hide behind cover, preaim, pop out and one-shot someone, repeat. ditto for mass effect. the only real combat challenge in these games is the hp-sponge sort of enemy, which isn't really fun imo. the difficulty scaling only works under the assumption that the player is pretty bad at aiming.
There are plenty of fixes to this from AI behavior that flushes you out successfully to one that penalizes you being pinned down (cover fire + rush from melee enemies).
The game also has poor incentives to go melee, too many enemies can one shot you at close range with shotguns (as evasion is your main damage avoidance stat) and if you do want to go the melee assassin route you are essentially penalized for it.
For melee to work you need to have the Berserker implant which goes into the same slot as the Operating System which means you lose your quickhack abilities which are both important from a narrative perspective and also needed for stealth play.
The only way I have to sum this game up is one poor design choice after another.
It has all the right pieces or most of them, but it doesn't have the right glue and with all the puns in the world it needs more polish...
to be fair, this is an issue with pretty much every rpg-ish fps. if you're good at aiming, deus ex is also really easy with a sniper rifle or assault rifle with max damage upgrades. hide behind cover, preaim, pop out and one-shot someone, repeat. ditto for mass effect. the only real combat challenge in these games is the hp-sponge sort of enemy, which isn't really fun imo. the difficulty scaling only works under the assumption that the player is pretty bad at aiming.