Thoughts on NPC combat & new update

I'll start off with the NPC combat, first off, it is fun, however in my opinion the AI are a bit too weak, it's very easy to just run through the combat sections (not literally run through but basically kill all the AI very easily) with taking almost no damage, I realize I do have a little more experience in shooter games than most, but I would suggest adding a difficulty slider. Then also, it would be nice to be able to turn specifically the combat music off, the songs that play when in NPC combat, they are in my opinion awful, can't stand listening to them, but I would like to still have the normal space engineers music, the orchestral stuff, not someone singing.

Next is the shooting itself, I'm glad you can turn the health bars off, that was one worry, however I was hoping for something a little less lazy than just hitmarkers, audio visual feedback in hits is I believe very important in making shooting feel satisfying. Think the crunch sound when you hit a headshot in Rust, or the dink in CS, and their respective body shot sounds. Then there should be visual feedback as well, I realize that you might not want blood splatters in SE due to ratings and all that, but it could even be air decompressing from the suit when shot, there are lots of ways to give visual feedback without blood in SE. As for the guns themselves, the range could be a bit higher, there were a couple times where I went for a vantage point, started to shoot at the enemies, but were out of range, 400m would probably be an improvement. The guns could use a little more power, not necessarily damage, but feel, more screen shake when shooting, the gunshot sounds could use a bit more punch, they sort of feel like toy guns in my opinion when comparing them to guns in other games. Then lastly the recoil, it doesn't feel at all noticeable, again I realize that may largely be due to my experience with CS or Rust, but I feel it's worth mentioning.

Moving on to the rest of the update, lot of good changes, for the most part I like the new block switching system, however it could use a little more customization, for instance, I'd rather have the scroll wheel only affect variants of the same block, I'd rather not have the scroll wheel switch between blocks/items on my hotbar. Next is the ore, which is in my opinion is an awful change, I hate the new ore, initially when I saw preview photos in the dev diaries I liked it, but in game it just looks incredibly cartooney, I feel it would fit perfectly in like fortnite, looks worse without parallax mapping, I think part of it is how big the chunks of metal are (most egregious in the iron ore), but the vibrancy doesn't help either. For the vibrancy part, I get that's to allow it to be more easily identified, but it would be nice to have that as an option in settings ("vibrant ore"), as I never really had a problem with that personally.

Then finally, this isn't related to the current update, but playing through it I watched through the starting cinematic again, and was reminded of how stiff and unnatural the acting & writing is there, something really needs to be done about that, it just feels like the characters are just vomiting information out for the player, might as well have them look at the camera, which is also presented like it's a narration but it isn't? I think what might be better is if it's in a captain's log format, jumping between entries made by both characters.

Overall I would say it's a good update, but still a lot to be done.