A pretty fun session overall, the handicap seemed to prevent myself and Simon from winning most of the time. Also the challenges we faced on some levels were just hilarious.
For example:
Selective Rescue when skills got reduced, we ended up with less worker (floater) Lixes than the usual 3, which made us very sheepish to try sabotaging in fear of losing the ability to finish the splatform.
Also when we had 1/5 skills, the builders/walkers being reduced to 10 and the diggers being reduced to 4 was brutal! This level was a very good example of the handicap working well.
And in Rescue Ranger Double Team, this only got worse!
Then in Playtime (10 of everything skillset), me and Simon were effectively reduced to 4 of everything when we did 1/3 of skills and the level was very hard to solve at this stage so any sabotage and we were effectively done.
Then there was the funny time we had 1 of everything in Group Therapy XD, the level was near impossible on that skillset.
I'm happy with the handicap and it brought a funny twist to the game, it did help the less experienced players to go on to win and because they knew we were handicapped, it ended up being me and Simon being afraid of everyone else for a change!
It gives the more experienced players a much harder challenge and it also gives the less experienced a fighting chance, but it's very dependent on what level is being played, we stuck mostly to familiar levels and we played a lot of levels over and over to try and test the varying levels of handicap.
We didn't even touch the score multiplier sadly, we just stuck to the number of Lix, skillset reduction and spawn delay handicaps.
I highly advise those who didn't enjoy Lix in the past due to the high difficulty curve and more experienced players to come back and give the game a chance because this handicap is a massive game changer!