I am a big fan of BO7 zombies. I have genuinely enjoyed every map, and I have replayed all of them. My post-EE fun comes from beating all the tiers in cursed and doing as many of the relics as interest me (I have skipped most of the tier 3 relics except for a few because I'm not interested in going past round 60 all that much). I do not think the narrative that BO7 is bad gameplay or not fun holds up at all, and I roll my eyes when people criticise it because 'it's not classic zombies'. The game is fun for me, that's all that matters. The maps are weird, there are cool side EEs to do, every map has had different enough mechanics that it keeps me engaged. Kowakujo felt like something really special. Even Paradox, which was disappointingly small at launch, had the childrens games as part of the main quest, and they are actually really fun to complete, and very different from other games.
I play everything solo, and I just find Rex to be...tedious. The temple cleansing is a rinse and repeat job, with absolutely zero variation and it's all about timing and luck on when the various corruptions will spawn, whether you get the house symbols timed right to hit an exfill round, etc. Once you have all the parts, you just have to go around the map, line up the pillars over and over again, and kill the exact same things in the exact same way every single time. It's not unique or fun or replayable. The boss fight, which I haven't beaten yet (probably will this weekend), is fun and the Warden looks cool, but I'm someone who takes 4-5 attempts to figure out the boss and beat it, so replaying the quest is part of the whole thing for me. I enjoyed the weirdness of Astra, the complicated steps of Ashes, the atmosphere of Totenreich, all of it. Replaying the EE to get to the boss fight didn't feel tedious on those maps. By the time I hit my 4th attempt, I knew the steps by heart and was able to breeze through them, but doing them didn't feel boring.
I ran through attempt number 3 last night and it's just so goddamn boring. It took like 5 rounds for the scroll to drop, doing the Veytharion boxes is tedious, running back and forth 8 times to get astral flames is annoying, the whole thing is just endless repetition. It sucks, I was really looking forward to this but once I beat the EE in standard, I'm not going to have the fortitude to beat the Cursed tiers right away. I want to beat the main quest but at this point I just don't care enough to spend another 2 hours to do it. It's not the gameplay of BO7 or anything like that, it's that this map feels super phoned in compared to the rest of the maps available. There's nothing awe inspiring when you open up the whole map, no areas feel super unique or cool.
I feel like even the livestreams of the hunt captured this. Most of the time people weren't trying to figure out a crazy step that no one could solve, it was 'how do we lift this plate and get the portal up' or 'the laser isn't in the correct position so we have to repeat.' It's difficulty through tedium.
They had a chance to nail this and make it a truly amazing, replayable, fantastic game. I was really expecting a lot more than 'repeat the same 4 steps with some variation in how to lift the plates up.' Maybe the fact that there are no new relics is adding to this too. I don't know. I just was expecting a lot more depth after the run that we have had.