To be honest, I am bad at this game. I know that! But ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ do I not like this game. Ignore the 100+ hours, I have idled it multiple, multiple times.

I think there's a lot of legitimately stupid design decisions (ex: debuffs on enemies are not viewable) that are pretty much indefensible (queue the "use mods!") My major frustration just stems from how stupidly opaque the mechanics are and work. Not just stuff like "barbarians will prefer to not close and will instead throw things at you from two spaces away" but also core gameplay logic like "you will not make nearly enough money doing contracts alone, so get ready to buy trade resources whenever possible". Learning by failing is a way to play but it doesn't feel good in long, overarching campaigns. As much as it is to play this with a wiki page open on my second monitor, I can do other things with my time that I personally find more valuable.

Got 20 minutes in, built the workshop and womb, and then got the camera somehow locked behind the wall in the base (all I can see is the backwall of the base, but from the perspective of outside the base). Quit/restart did not fix it, so I just refunded. Not worth the time or money.

Leaving this as a reminder to myself--it's just not a lot of fun to play. I don't like combat or exploration here. It feels like a bad combination of the Bethesda Fallout series and Bioshock.

Combat: no weight to it. That's not fully it--movement feels way too flighty (melee enemies will constantly swing and miss past you, and dodging similarly throws you about the room), but gunplay feels heavy. I'm not a programmer and I can't tell you why I have a visceral dislike to the combat, but I do. It's very much a "feel" sort of thing.

Exploration: I've played for a few hours and it's been very on the rails. That's fine, early hours on a big game tend to be pretty railroaded, but I'm not even seeing alternate paths. There are side rooms (rarely!) but as befitting the sanded-off version of Fallout, very little loot that is actually valuable. It's just some of the 6 crafting resources. As far as I've seen, there are not multiple paths through things, either. Not a "crawl through this vent OR go through this door", from what I've seen it's just a lot of "go through this door, now go through this door".

I will add a note here that I really don't like the dialogue or narrative. It's an incredibly interesting concept that is, frankly, ruined by the early 2000s-era dialogue. Even sidestepping the gratuitous sexualized comments, the main character just keeps cursing. It distracts from the gameplay, all the more so because no one else in the game world does it! I don't need a wordless protagonist but it comes across so juvenile that I can't bear to keep playing when combined with the above.

I can imagine someone liking this, but I cannot imagine myself liking it.