It looks like the protocol droids show visible damage, which is an excellent touch. Great job! Will the bigger droids also show damage? As for the animations: I think they were going for a "quickly flip weapon safety off or prepare weapon for action as the player raises it" look to jazz things up, and also explain the slight delay when equipping weapons in SS2. I understand why, it's a nice little visual flourish. The Fusion Cannon spinning rotor thing looks very nice!
The only animations I have questions about are the "delayed shotgun pump" & the "pistol slide rack". The pump action timing still seems a bit off, because the pump action is seen moving backwards twice: once immediately as it's fired, then a second time as Goggles pumps it to eject the shell. I imagined the shotgun as a dual pump/semi auto shotgun (like the Benelli M3), with the weird box thingy on the pump to accommodate it somehow. Thanks to the crumminess of their space shotgun design, the fore-end action doesn't actually cycle after the shell is fired: this forces Goggles to manually pump it. Same thing for the triple shot mode. In those cases, the shotgun fore-end or pump, simply wouldn't move whatsoever, UNTIL Goggles manually pumps it. It'd be a simple tweak, but I don't know if it can be done for the June release date!
Do certain skills like "modify"or "weapons" affect the shotgun (or any other weapon) fire rate specifically as well? Or just the reload speed? If the former, I guess you would have to also accommodate different speeds in your firing animations depending on player upgrades.
As for the pistol, this is mostly a pet peeve aka old man yelling at clouds. Pulling back the slide to chamber a round the very first time you equip the pistol is fine, but you'd be ejecting a perfectly good round if you subsequently did it every time you pull the pistol out. You could visually model this ejection but NOT have it affect your ammo capacity a la Metal Gear Solid 4, but why Goggles appears to be wasting vital ammo is a good question. More importantly, the racking slide animation is fine, but if the player has to fire ASAP as soon as they equip the pistol, having it jump from a larger animation to a much smaller firing one, would be very jarring. I know there's no manual safety on pistol slide in SS2, but having him thumb a safety off would be more straightforward. It'd be a lot less jarring to go from a brief "thumb swipes safety off" animation to an emergency firing one, compared to a "Slide being pulled back" one IMHO. Plus when Goggles puts the pistol away, you could have him put the safety back on as he does so
One thing I didn't like in the Black Mesa remake of HL1, especially in custom maps, was that there was very detailed & pretty "admire/chamber a round for the very first time" animation, that only played the very first time you got a new weapon. Concept is great, but in practice, either you stood there admiring the genuinely nice work, because this particular level designer had placed it in a safe spot, OR you'd have to frantically fire at enemies the second you got a new weapon (BM custom maps are also notorious for this), thus skipping the animators hard work. Getting the Tau cannon in Questionable Ethics is a good example. It's a bit jarring gameplay wise.
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