YMMV / Marauder

• Better Off Sold:
  • While you can use food to recover health, the healing provided by it is very small relative to the size and price of it. Combined with the high price and stackability, you're better off simply selling it.
  • The Bizon suffers from being So Last Season, as you obtain at the point of the game where every enemy is wearing armor. Even with Zhirik having all SMG perks, you're better off giving him a machine gun or an assault rifle. In fact, Akhmet even notes in his diary that he should simply sell the Bizon.
• Designated Hero: Akhmet suffers from this, as he tends to be abrasive in some dialogues, treats his wife like shit (even once literally telling her to Stay in the Kitchen), sees nothing wrong with killing people (and doesn't object to the use of hobos to disarm landmines), murders innocent russian soldiers in Mission 1 as they try to prevent him from stealing their stuff, generally only does quests for selfish reasons, spends the majority of the game killing russians despite stating that he hates the NATO occupation of the country, and even considers abandoning Vitek and Serb to die when he flees the town.
• Game-Breaker: Popping out from behind corners is ridiculously fast, making it trivial for you to get the first shot if your character's skills are halfway decent, and you can pop back into the corner just as fast. The only balancing factor here is that you're liable to shoot your own cover if the corner is at the character's right side, and that the game isn't consistent about what counts as a cover.
• Goddamned Bats: Feral dogs move surprisingly slowly, lack any armor, and are easy to hit and kill, as you have assault rifles and shotguns by the time you first encounter them, along with a second party member. However, they come in large amounts, can easily stunlock your party members into death/unconsciousness if they get to them (though this is unlikely), and the only loot form them are low-value furs, which aren't even guaranteed to drop. One of the later levels of the game also has Akhmet going alone through an entire map of nothing but dogs, meaning that you just click on heads with not much in the way of tactics.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • Akhmet's wife is immortal, and injuring her won't end your game. However, you can still raise your agility and hand-to-hand combat by beating her, and this also nets you experience, thus allowing you to raise your level with little effort required.
  • The mounted machine guns will refill their ammo when you exit the map and come back. This means that you only need to buy ammo for them if you fire off more than 100 rounds during a mission.
• Nintendo Hard: Because of the game using the same ultra-realistic mechanics as 7.62, the gunfights can be extremely brutal, with accurately modeled ballistics and sight lines, along with guns inflicting a high amount of damage (with headshots often being instantly lethal), and characters being able to suffer crippling injuries. A slight miscalculation on which position to hold your gun in, for instance, can result in you getting shot first, falling unconscious, and getting kicked to death. Not just that, but every fight in the game involves you fighting against numerically superior forces, with them usually outnumbering your party by 5 times or more, yet often having the same equipment as you.
• Paranoia Fuel: Some of the outdoor maps in the second half of the game may occasionally have sounds of feral dogs barking loudly (as if they're nearby), followed by gunfire. Nothing will actually happen, but hearing it for the first time, especially if you're looting after combat, can easily make you suspect that you're about to be attacked by dogs or bandits.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • The game lacks actual cover mechanics (other than popping from behind corners), and your characters won't adjust their guns to avoid hitting obstacles. As such, it's very common for you to accidentally shoot the cover you're hiding behind instead of the enemy, turning what should've been a hit into a miss, and usually causing your party member to immediately die/fall unconscious when the enemy gets their shot in.
  • Mounted machine guns can't be used to target an individual target, only an area. As such, it's hard to score hits with them, and anybody who lays down becomes effectively immune to your fire.
• Scrappy Weapon:
  • SMGs and pistols suffer greatly from low range and low damage, combined with them being unable to reliably penetrate armor. As such, even with the game giving you the Bizon in the same mission where you get Zhirik (who has a fully upgraded SMG perk tree), you're better off selling the former and giving the latter a machine gun or assault rifle. The weakness of these weapons is even lampshaded, as the PM is noted to be practically worthless in its description, while Akhmet's diary describes the Bizon as being only fit for being sold.
  • The entire class of melee weapons is absolutely useless, as they take valuable time and weapon slots to equip (when you can simply strike enemies with your fists or your currently equipped gun), require their own skill (which is practically useless, as even a 10 in hand-to-hand works fine), occupy a lot of inventory space (in a game where most locations can only be visited once, making inventory space extremely valuable), and don't even provide much of an improvement in damage. Just to make things worse, unarmed melee attacks already ignore most armor and stunlock enemies regardless of hand-to-hand skill and perks, so there's no point to using melee weapons anyway.
• Some Dexterity Required: The Real-Time with Pause inherited from Brigade E5 and 7.62, combined with somewhat awkward controls and the realistic modeling of sight lines and where your bullets come from, can make gunfights feel clunky. At first, you'll likely end up getting shot due to slightly mispositioning your characters and thus failing to hit your enemy, or failing to nail your own shots as you accidentally shoot your own cover. Even after you get practice with how things work, accidents like that can still happen.
• That One Level: The second fight of Mission 7. You're in a forest, with trees blocking sight lines and allowing enemies to pop out from unexpected places, there are 20+ enemies, all of these enemies are equipped with the best weapons available at this point of the game, including several machine guns, AKMs, and SVDs (which can often score a One-Hit Kill if they bypass armor), many of them upgraded, and nearly all of them are equipped with armor. It's very likely that you'll have multiple companions knocked out or suffering critical injuries, and that somebody may have their gun break in the middle of battle due to overheating.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The game's depiction of Russian politicians being willing to sell out the country to NATO date the game as being a product of the 2000's and the way that Russia seemed to be getting closer to the West, as the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 showed that the politics of Russia are far more hostile to western countries.
• Values Dissonance: The game's treatment of women as simply existing and not really doing anything useful (with Akhmet arguing with his wife, while she says dumb things), with only a few exceptions, would be perceived as sexist by most westerners.