Balanced? Somewhat.
Map dependent? Yes. Especially for tactics. How do you counter a barrel heading towards you? Make a base at a one-way area, place a few potato mines, and if they're heading your direction, drop a wall to make them park over the minefield. Boom!
Enjoyable? From my experience, no. Too long of a match, typical repetitive experience of 3 against 7, and players almost always went to the same exact spots in certain maps.
Frankly, I should have split the mystery portal discussion in the Rux thread into its own topic.
This portal was a lot more fun on Thursday. I find it good to get into these portal events early before players have begun to work out how to exploit the mode and characters to their advantage.
The portal wasn't so bad this week. I will say tactics make a very big difference in team performance. (Standard run and gun is almost useless in this portal.) As usual the SBMM created a lot of near empty lobbies. Some games were as low as 3 v. 2. Obviously that lead to very, very long games which got annoying very quick. Basically it was fun as long as there was a decent size lobby.
Also, for some reason I kept being put with very low level players even though I am 5455. Some lobbies I cut through like butter, those weren't really fun because it felt like I was making a lot of players unhappy. (Nobody likes just dieing over and over.) Something is wrong when I am getting 28 vanquish streaks in a 50 point game and nobody else in the lobby comes close. Makes me wonder what exactly they are basing my skill on. (if it didn't help with bosses I would say drop it entirely.)
It's a decent one. Pirates won slightly more often in my time in the portal but not by a large amount. The drone swarms at the beginning of the matches were amusing, there were potato mines EVERYWHERE, and I enjoyed it greatly.
My favorite is still Rando's Revenge in the portal but this was a good one.
A lot of drone and bird fly early in the game and they're racing for 1st strike, so they fly high to middle of the map and target the first player they see.
But I fly mine to the corner of the map and fly it very low to avoid radar, sniper and ground to air missile, and find out who still on their remote control and deliver the bomb with high success rate. If somehow didn't deliver the kill, finish it off while they still in shock and confused.
The game fun when the lobby is full and a lot of newbie players but when players start leaving and only left good players, it starts become intense since we become a real (sneaky) sniper and don't want to reveal their position. It becomes tick tack toe game and can go on for very long time.
Overall it's a good sniper match.
