Thanks for the replies. I think I need to add some things because I rush typed that out in about 10 minutes before work and missed some things.
It is somewhat like Borderlands and somewhat not.
The single player is terrible, make no doubts about it. The bots aren't the smartest and it gets frustrating because the bots on your team are crippled compared to the enemy bots to make up for player skill.
You will have to play challenges to unlock weapons and gear. These are 1-4 player co-op vs. AI missions that sort of serve as a tutorial, but unfortunately, it devolves into pretty quickly. It doesn't seem to have a wait to respawn thing like the rest of the game so you respawn instantly when you die, but so do the enemy bots.
What this means is frustration everywhere, especially on the first mission. Imagine an unending wave of enemy bots instantly respawning. It makes it annoying to do the objectives as you find yourself almost always outnumbered. Luckily they're terrible so it's not too big a deal but still quite annoying and don't forget you have to do each twice to unlock everything. Luckily it doesn't take long to do them and one of them doesn't involve combat at all, rather just movement dynamics.
As for Borderlands, the skills, reskilling and shooting is a lot like that game. It's no TF2 in class dynamics. All classes can kill all other classes and use every weapon available to their body size. Unlike TF2, the weapons seems much more conventional and familiar and the gameplay is definitely slower paced. You're not going to be able to shotgun someone twice and see them die, rather, with smart people, you will pump supressive fire downrange until someone eventually falls over. Of course there's always that idiot running out in the open and those deaths happen pretty quickly.
The one thing I have to mention though is maps. Some maps are indeed pretty imbalanced. Judging by point values, we can have equal teams but fail the same map 3 times back to back. The one with the biological weapon seems particularly imbalanced. I rarely go past the starting choke as security forces.
Again, this could be the players I play with, they tend to bunch together at a choke and just take potshots at each other until someone dies, which with the gun-play in this game takes quite a while. Again, people tend to forget that objectives are the main goal and just try to kill each other. Given how much cover there is, the inaccuracy of most weapons and the massive amount of damage you can take with buffs, even medium scale engagements can draw out for a long time over multiple reloads.
Still, I think this is a good game, but it needs time to develop. I ran into a single latency issue while having good ping, but otherwise it's been a smooth affair. The biggest issue is players really need to adapt to the actual "team" in "teamplay".
I'd give it something like a 78 or C+, waiting on a player base to develop.
*Piss poor single player experience, which is not unexpected but disappointing. I bought this for entertainment sine I'll be deploying on Thursday but I probably won't play this much without an internet connection.
*Fun without being frustrating. Even when I lose, I still have fun with it for some reason, maybe because it always feels like you're accomplishing something. Unlike Bad Company 2, the rage is much fewer and far between.
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