The amount of rng you need is absurd. Enemies are the tankiest i’ve ever seen in this franchise. You basically can’t do real damage to the later enemies unless you get some of the enhancers like streamlined or the one that gives extra headshot damage. Weapon drops are also randomized so it’s basically GG if you get nothing but bad drops.
What makes this worse is that you have significantly less time in rank 5. It takes AGES to kill some enemies just to be rewarded with 4 pistols and several sets of useless enhancers. You’re incentivized to kill the glowing zombies because they drop weapons, but they take so many shots to kill it’s almost not even worth it a good amount of the time.
The most reliable way to kill enemies (except glowing zombies for some reason) is the hatchet, but it breaks in 3-4 kills and you have limited repairs which also aren’t guaranteed. Blue glowing zombies need to be parried to do significant damage to them, but there’s no guarantee that you’ll actually have a hatchet since you can’t repair on command.
This is especially worse in boss fights where the hatchet breaks in 3-4 parries. There’s typically at least one hatchet repair from what i’ve seen but the fights are a complete damage check. They’re essentially “Can you kill them before your hatchet breaks”. If your hatchet is broken against gideon and you don’t have the best enhancers, I literally don’t know what you can do other than pray for an rpg before you die.
The first few stages of this mode are genuinely pretty enjoyable, but rank 5 is awful.