The reason why I'm writing this review is because I cannot simply believe the gamespot review saying it is difficult or challenging and putting that as one of the advantages of the game.
I'm going to tell you my personal experience playing this game, and it may differ to other people. I have no doubt a lot of people love this game and I can understand that : the visuals are great. However during my time playing I didn't like it, moreover I find that 60€ for this game is overpriced for what it's worth.
I've spent about 6 hours in painstakingly boring battles because there was no challenge whatsoever in story mode. I could not continue past this point because every battle was the same : extremely easy and boring, predictable. Every character has only 3 actions : move, shoot and a special ability, but even the special abilities are rehashed abilities. Now imagine playing a Final Fantasy Tactics game with only 3 abilities available to you : no spells, no magic, no sneaky abilities, nothing. The design is very well made but the battles are extremely boring simply because they don't give you a choice of having more strategies by having more abilities. All I did in every single battle is move, shoot, move, shoot, move shoot, move, shoot. In a turn-based party game that is way too simplist and I would have preferred having more choices to do.
What doesn't help is that on your first (and probably only) playthrough, you have to select either easy or normal difficulties, which means you cannot select hard and therefore have to play through levels such that no matter what you do you will always win. My usual strategy is to win as fast as possible and therefore to jump behind an enemy and shoot him in the face from right next to him. I have yet to encounter a match where I don't get "perfect" score. I mean I know my strategy requires a lot of thinking and so much intellect but could you please not give me "Perfect" every single time? It's like the game is saying that this playstyle is the pinnacle of perfection. I was thinking maybe I am too old for this and the target audience for this game is 4 year olds who would do even more random plays, such as jumping in the middle of 5 enemies without cover but even then I don't have a doubt they would win in normal mode. The AI is smart? The AI runs behind EXPLOSIVE crates all the time. They're beyond stupid. All you have to do is shoot on the explosive crates and they die instantly. How is this a smart play? Maybe it gets harder towards the middle or end game. I have no idea because I won't waste my time getting there by doing useless battles over hours in which I can do the same old bad strategy over and over again just so to get to a point where finally I can play the game in a strategic way.
I tried playing multiplayer, but sadly there are only a handful of multiplayer levels and you cannot play story mode with a friend which is a huge letdown And I have no idea why. This is a turn based game where players could have controlled each a character (just like in the designed multiplayer levels) and I have no idea why they didn't implement it. Maybe it would've been a little less boring playing through the story with a friend who could occasionally troll you and make it a little bit harder, but no. You have to play it all alone.
In conclusion of all the time I've played it I was bored out of my mind due to the simplistic nature of actions given to you (move-shoot) and the extremely easy difficulty.
The great visuals, design, jokes don't help the score if I'm bored and sadly so much money went into the visuals to make the game good-looking but so little went into the actual gameplay.