I can not get past the first mission. I've tried three times now. I am playing solo because my ISP is total crap (and I don't have a choice of switching, only one in my area), and I can not play online multiplayer. I always get disconnects when ever I try with any game. Same with this, it sucks.

But yeah, I find this to be very hard on solo. After you kill the reactor and you start making your way to the exit, I just get ganged up on by like 12-18 dudes and they just annihilate me. Part of the issue is I am not finding enough ammo, so I end up having to melee them while trying to run past, and that never works. Ugh. I kinda like the game, but this experience is making me think I should just stop playing it. Maybe if I just keep trying and save up some of that XP I can eventually get past it.

the ammo problem would only get worst on co-op since almost everyone is using the starting rifle or the upgraded braton

so I ended up melee a whole lot

just remember don't tap melee key, hold it down for the heavy slash, it can one hit almost every unshielded enemy

It's balanced for multiplayer, and the enemies don't scale to team size in any way, so you're always going to be a disadvantage. Though I can say that soloing gets easy once you get your shield/health total into the 300s, which doesn't take that long since early levels are quick. Either way, maybe just wait a month or so and let the bug fixing patches come in and see if that fixes your problem. The missions become unwinnable quite frequently atm, so you really aren't missing out if you choose to wait for that to be fixed anyway.

I finally beat it (the first mission that is). I kinda really like this game. I wish my connection was better so I could co-op this bitch.

Have you tried shooting them?

Yeah, I tried it out last night and I love this game but I have to get used to the camera. I died a bunch last night on the first mission. My need to kill everything in front of me only made the mission harder since the game kept spawning more and more Grineers.