>>15694310
>The point is what you do with it
What you do with it is pretty much the same. Run at the speed of light towards a base, snatch the dude dressed in funny clothes and eat him in a backalley.
Wait for the alarm to go off, enter without raising any suspicions, eat anyone that has a powerup and then kill everything inside that base.
Go outside, throw explosives at that base until it's dead.
You can go with stealth, but it's more frustrating and slower, especially with the sensors late game, and you have no reason not to much on the commander while under alert and come back later when alarms last such a short amount of time. You don't even need to do any of this once you have all the unlockables for the current stage you're at, you can just demolish bases for cheap points.
Infected bases are even worse since you skip all the stealth and go directly to crushing a building.
It all ends up feeling like a damn chore. Repetitive tasks that you complete to unlock things that let you perform the same repetitive tasks but with a new toy you didn't need anyway.
Why is Muscle Mass a power when regular throws already kill pretty much anything and you have Hammerfists? What's the point of Claws once you have the Blade? What's the point of Thermal Vision once you have infected vision? What's the point of two devastors that are both gigantic AoEs but one of them only works on the ground?
What's the point of all the melee combos you unlock when everything either dies on the very first punch or can escape and\or interrupt your combo?
The second game refined this a bit better, every power does feel far more distinct in how they work, but still has the same problem of having very powerfull tools for very simple jobs.
>the game has its challenges because it's not just dumbly killing anything, even if you could.
You can wreck any base and any enemy simply by "dumbly killing anything" and much on passersby or soldiers to regain health incredibly fast, something made even more trivial with the whip.
Stealth is a fucking joke and it has to be imposed on you either by yourself or by a mission's fail state. Otherwise you're better off just rampaging around with little to no chalenge.
Only missions that offer any sort of "chalenge" are escort missions and only because you're mostly stripped from your powers, but they aren't fun at all. Or forced stealth missions that aren't much fun either.
The game was advertized as having two different playstyles possible: a rampaging monster or a psychopath infiltrator. The second one is barely there and feels tacked on. You don't build a network of infiltrators, you don't investigate your target's life and assignments to impersonate them, you don't study the places you're going to infiltrate to find the relevant individual that can get you inside if you wear him, you don't get your shit fucked if you're caught and have to run for your life, etc.
That aspect of the game is pretty much just the default stealth sections that many other games put on for some extra padding when the theme of the game allowed a lot more to be done with it.