I can understand some of the complaints about level design, but it is really hard to do 'sci-fi factory' and not have large areas look really hard to differentiate, hell, it's pretty hard to do that in a modern factory setting. They did try to change things up, the two outdoor segments (not including walk in the park) are pretty different from each other, but still have the generic brown, black, grey, and white scheme as everything else. The factory floor and R&D look pretty different, and the executive forum is completely different, when you aren't in an accessway (which all look identical because they are, and it makes perfect sense for them to look identical). I actually found the biggest problem with everything looking samey to be more on the lighting than the environmental design, lots of really deep dark shadows and bright actinic lights make it hard to tell that the tileset is distinctive (again, within the completely reasonable sameness of an industrial setting, where using bulk components for construction is a very smart decision).
They could have done more with color and such to make the different sections of the factory look different. It wouldn't have been so bad if the non-factory levels had been less like a factory too. For example if the biolab level was more like a lush biolab and not... a generic factory floor with some plants scattered here and there. Or as you say the accessways should all look the same which is fine but why did they decide to put
so much of the end of the game inside them? Why couldn't R&D have been running around a science area, instead of running around accessways and every now and then popping out to a small science area so you can kill some baddies then go into another accessway?
Also this is more of a personal preference rather than saying it's objectively bad, but I wish the levels had been more linear and less "centralized with shortcuts". I just found it made things more confusing, especially the inter-level shortcuts (the ones that didn't lead back to ops).
I guess saying "worst level design ever" was maybe a little excessively hyperbolic but it did really weaken my impression of the game.
Also, can you explain what you mean by clunky controls? I own Dark Souls 2 and 3 and The Surge, and of them I would say that The Surge is vastly smoother in the control department, Warren is way more responsive and much easier to control.
A lot of little things. Keep in mind I'm playing on KB/M so a controller might not have the same issues.
Slide attack is sprint + attack, however pressing attack without holding sprint locks you into a slow basic attack animation that you can't dodge-cancel out of. Meanwhile, pressing dodge while holding sprint does not make you dodge, it makes you do some stupid pointless jump that drains a HUGE chunk of stamina. So the result is in action heavy sequences where you are both dodging and slide attacking a lot (the last boss in particular) it's easy to accidentally either waste all your stamina, or lock yourself in place with a "kill me" sign.
The duck/jump system just felt so awkward I only tried to use it a few times after it was introduced and got killed horribly every time so I gave up on it completely. Nice idea, but the controls needed to be more intuitive or something.
Another thing is sometimes when I was trying to do dodge attacks, I'd do some kind of heavier attack instead. I never figured out what I was doing to trigger it, it was never more than a minor annoyance but it was still annoying.
Using health items seemed unreliable. You can't use them in the middle of a combo.. but sometimes you can. You can't use them while getting hit... except sometimes you can? I ended up just hammering the health key constantly hoping for the best, sometimes it worked and sometimes I died.
Finally just all the animation locking in general combined with a lot of the slow attack animations (maybe weapon specific, I was using single rigged) just made it feel unresponsive, even though the controls were generally good and responsive when you were not animation locked.
Those are the major annoyances I can remember offhand anyway.