Abby being female

(+ while having an unrealistically hypermasculinzed body)

and lev being trans is not why the game sucks

No, but to the average video game consumer, it made the game too bizarre and its characters too unrelatable to actually want to play it.

And I'm just tellin' it how it is here. I'm not going to lie and say a whole bunch of potential buyers chose not to buy the game for some other reason. Every single person I've discussed this with while playing Factions along with everyone I've discussed it with in real life says the same, "transphobic", politically incorrect thing about this game and why they refuse to have anything to do with it.

I know the status quo is to delude ourselves into believing, or at least into parroting, the general idea that the world loves and accepts everyone no matter what they choose to do to their bodies (as long as it makes them transgendered of course), but that's just not the world we live in, and the commenter above is 100% accurate in their assumption that the game would've had a much warmer reception had the characters been more relatable to the majority of consumers that make up the Playstation games market.