It's fun to play - even though graphics, music and mechanics are not optimal.
The game has a dedicated Dev sitting behind it and today thats worth more than anything!

This game tries to be two things at once and both of them not very successful. I will admit that the music and graphics are nice and the weapons sound design is superp, but that's it.

Originally designed as PVE Coop Game, third person made a lot of sense (with NPCs being overpowered by using learning AI and able to two shot/stun you).
In PvP most ppl will agree with me that third person for a shooter makes 0 sense and lets you become a corner camping squatter (PUBG got first person mode for a reason). This gets even worse since you are forced to extract (unless you are able to craft/buy hatch keys - for day/no event maps only) at certain extraction points that are time limited.

Now add a random and late spawn into the game (literally 10 meter spawn distance from the next player, even if the game is running already for 15min) with overpopulated maps and very few loot and you get an extract camper deluxe edition with 5 people showing up wherever a solo fired a shot.

To further fuel the PvP and Anti-Coop play, you add time limited trials that only make sense to complete solo on event maps (cuz they give you 2x Points for some reason and your teammates steal your points). These event maps only occur during certain specific times every day - meaning if you cannot make it between 8-9pm you have to wait for the next day (with thousands of others trying to do the same thing).

Feeling cozy already?

It gets better: You do that to earn unappealing cosmetics that look like Karl Lagerfeld had a baby with Chernobyl. Fail to imagine it? Just imagine something worse and add a cherry on top and make it pink - there you go. Of course you can also pay 20$ for one skin (half the price of the game) - they recently made some skins cheaper though cuz the backlash was too big (omg so ungreedy - wow!).

The quests you do feel unimportant and a lot of times you don't even know where they begin or end cuz the description is way too bad, so you have to constantly look it up online (just to press E somewhere in a main PvP area).

There are also major bugs like switching your gun and it simply won't shoot, people glitching purposely through walls with barricades to gain access into locked loot rooms, very bad server perfomance and obviously matchmaking (constantly getting shot while already in cover - you could think it's a latency/region issue but it's not: you can switch MANUALLY to your region, then disabling crossplay and still have the same thing happening plus bad latency sign on the right and I got high speed fiber internet gaming with a 5080).

The gunplay feels as if you're lucky to hit a target, not because you have skill. As seen in several of my replays the crosshair was perfectly on the players head: Still hit nothing. The crosshair seems to behave even differently when you switch the shoulder view (test it in practice range - very inaccurate).

Almost all skills feel totally meaningless despite of a very few like more stamina, more carry-weight and in round crafting (what is totally op). A lot of skills don't even work right or are described in a confusing way like "you gain stamina back faster when walking" - this doesn't refer to not sprinting, but to slow walking (bound to the V-key).

During gunfights you are forced to do weird sliding/hopping to be competitive. I'm saying weird because it's a combination of hold crouch and toggle crouch (they behave very different too for some reason - even when you slide down hill).

As if all of that wouldn't be enough the game play loop favors people who betray you the first chance they get:
- Meeting a friendly, putting your gun away, helping him out, showing them where the nice loot is - get shot in the back!
- Extracting with someone else, typing the console to get both of you out safely? Get shot in the back!
- Getting a team together in Duos or Trios, trying to take down some huge robots - Get shot in the back!
There you have it: The fun you needed to make your evening and sleep better, totally wasting your time for no progression at all, losing your hard earned stuff in seconds to someone else who doesn't have a conscience and just waited in the bushes/behind a wall in third person for you to do the work.

The thing is that way too many people spawn in on the map and keep on spawning in late. You cannot have an encounter with NPCs/Arcs or another player without 3-5 more players showing up in seconds, no matter if it's solo/duo/trios.

Now you could say "Just go into the game with a free loadout and do the same, you have nothing to lose!" - Yes,that's part of the problem: people having nothing to lose will keep on acting like that, because they can! They make progression by playing lame, toxic and without any effort and you are left with nothing but the thought: Why did I even waste my time preparing for hours, collecting all the stuff the whole week to craft a nice weapon and upgrade it, shields, augments, weapon modifications, grenades, barricades, mines, zipline etc if a camper with free loadout or simply some remote detonators at the extract can EASILY take it from you? Other Extraction Shooters like Hunt Showdown only give you free loadout, when you have almost nothing else left (what makes totally sense - and you are even unable to stack up on free stuff).

To me the game feels like a pain to play and the fun mainly comes from friendly encounters - Coop encounters. But the game doesn't promote that - it promotes betrayal by giving ppl free guns and making you lose all your stuff instead of f.ex. permanently lowering it's durability by 25% and only losing your looted stuff - what would feel much more fair.

I'm over 700h now, leading one of the most successful guilds on our server.
The Devs making fun of the dedicated player base is surely not the right approach when it comes to handling serious criticism.
During these two months since release I had about 50 members leaving because of game breaking bugs and overall endgame design - what is basically none existent and that you reach solo after about 50h (if you play very very slowly - was meant to be several hundred hours).
The story unfortunately is bad and feels mixed together. "Instanced missions" (only about three in the whole story - was meant to be a whole farming loop) are bad and boring like almost every other mission as well. You enter a small area with as usual dumb and ignorable NPCs, take out a target and thats it. The rest is flying around - then killing this or that, then flying back - only very shallow character depth and maybe two or three times you can actually choose a dialogue option that will bring some variety.
Hagga Basin is still nice from a map design perspective but not enough since the Deep Desert is a buggy mess with almost no landscape and repetative islands and loot popping up every other week!
Their customer service is a joke - 99% automated messages even if you lose everything to a bug like your Orni/Carrier not being able to lift up any more, you being disconnected after flying over quicksand or thrown out of your cockpit, you losing all your items after switching to the world map and other "fun" things that make you wanna rage quit instantly.
Their anti-cheat is a joke, duping guilds dominating the Landsraad for months (not even making a secret of it) - softbanned only for a week, then doing the same thing all over again. Cheaters could even steal all of your stuff from chests, take over your vehicles, hell even had admin rights to the server!
Their patches are a joke (first making 50% of the DD PVE, then moving all the rare ressources into PVE as well - Plastanium farming in A-row, medium spice fields all over E and D, crippling Scouts, buffing carriers to escape easily, raising chests respawn times to 2h - you need to actually camp there, light NPC rifle guys easily shield break you but Heavys can be ignored etc etc - just too much to mention).
Seriously they don't know what they are doing, trying out things and looking for responses. Truly feels like we're still very deep into some beta phase ♥♥♥♥.
What was praised to be a nice endgame is a none desirable loop of crap. You are forced to move all your stuff back and forth every week (what can take hours depending on how many you are) only to place a new sub fief at 5am in the morning to grab a nice spot (adding more islands as promised was a joke as well since their size can only host solo player bases), then you farm melange with bugged out worms that reappear every 3 seconds right below you or not show up at all, look for blueprints in already empty testing stations (cuz npc's respawn after an hour - btw you can just solo it - was meant to be group content), camp the chest for 2h because ppl log out right next to it (takes 10 seconds in PvP zone - just ignore the 5min timer pop up message and click on "exit now" - LOL!), maybe have a fight against total PvP noobs/logging in chest campers that make you wonder how they even made it that far, and then do the same thing all over again. That's the endgame! Don't pay attention to the Landsraad, the vendors are a joke too - 90% offering crap you can craft yourself, the auction house feels cheap and will make you a multi millionaire after a week in the DD without means to spend your Solaris. Also they bring up the same three vendors almost every week and the same blueprint rotation and DD layout (there is no big pool at all!).

Basically the endgame is BORING and people stop playing as soon as they reach it!
If it wasn't for my guild, our community and our own content we created with events etc and my responsibility as a guild leader, I would have left after 50h as well!

A lot of things you said beforehand f.ex. that rockets will be sooo hard to craft and ppl using it lightly - I made 100k in two days without any effort, a meaningful class system, weapons, armors, rare blueprints, good fights, randomly generated DD blabla, all just bait and lies!

The game is still in a beta state.
And that's why you keep losing players and it's basically dead by now.

The included "Criminal Enterprise Starter Pack" doesn't work - meaning even if you download the Legacy Edition additionally and create a new character (what is mandatory) then you still won't receive the pack in either version. You can only contact Rockstar Support for this issue and not Steam (and Rockstar are taking their time of course - took them two months in my case - guess they finally added the pack by now - still leaving a bad review here for this service).
Also the graphic update is not as good as promoted plus the loading times are still very long. The AI is very bad and easy to fool and the controls are overly complicated. At least you can now heal yourself while opening your inventory, then pressing v - what still changes the camera angle but least you don't have to stop to go into 4 sub menues only to eat a snack (ppl even used macros for that). I remember people crying about the bad drive mechanics in Cyberpunk - well this game takes it to the top. You need to grind 20h of driving first so to that the road won't feel like soap any longer, but after that you're okay.

The atmosphere of the game is okay (the music and such) but the gameloop depends on you making strange decisions, that would otherwise considered to be wrong.

F.eks. to be able to recruit new soldiers, you need to NOT clear the forest area around camps or to have enough archers in the early/mid stage you need to NOT upgrade your towers (because you are unable to remove archers from towers afterwards and they will constantly try to man the towers even if they are in enemy territory and then beeing killed by flying monsters). What's also an issue is the need of npc's to step out of safety and get themselves killed.

If you mismanage your Kingdom in the early/mid stage, you won't be able to recover at all, you will be slowly thinned out until it's game over.
For this bad not well thought through mechanic I give the game a thumbs down.

Say Helloooooooo to Democracy!

If this is not one of the best takes on ridiculing our whole western society, then I don't know what is - greetings go out to Starship Troopers!

Gameplay awesome, never had more fun killing bugs
Graphics awesome, every explosion and light effect is a blessing for your eyes
Audio awesome, soundtrack is intense plus the sound effects just top-notch

Imo best Game of the Year!

alien gameplay is just bad and no fun:

- no overview map for aliens & therefore confusing lvl design
- not enough or valuable shortcuts to reach enemy players in time
- not enough melee dmg
- abilities almost worthless (too much energy drain, emp neglectable and easily outplayed)
- range attacks need long reload and are very inaccurate
- constantly forced to run invisible and crouch to avoid light dmg and noise (then energy doesn't recharge & if hit you get a big malus)
- time to recharge energy is way too long if you don't constantly eat eggs or stand on an energy leak
- invisibility on/off switching takes too long
- overall movement feels very clunky

go back to this game in a year or so, but right now it's a no and return for me unfortunately (AvP2 should be the goal but this isn't even close)

Awesome overall game because:

nice mechanics (fighting and base building plus co-op and different difficulties)
survival is hard if you don't know what you're doing
sounds and graphics make you feel like you're in the jungle
story is thrilling
FREE BIG DLCs

price is very good for all the content, definitely must have game!

Astonishing remake - unfortunately my exploratory needs have not yet been satisfied - I need more!!!

The music is awesome and sucks you right into the game, same goes for the 3D graphics that look amazing, especially the water, plants and insects. You really feel like you have been transported into the game. I loved every minute of it.

The puzzles are solvable without help, although I had to use some time of thinking in between and some solutions or progressions didn't come to my mind easily, but thats just how it should be!

Also the 3D Models look much better than in the Myst Remake. What I didn't like so much are the Domes that take a long time to open up each time. Other than that everything was bug free and a real Masterpiece once again. I made a terrible mistake at the last big puzzle that had me go a little crazy looking for hidden levers here and there, until I figured out that my notes haven't been correct at some point earlier, but as in every Cyan Game: Don't give up guys. The ending is worth it! I loved the holographic images of Gehn's parents.. gave his charakter so much more depth!
Looking forward for the next VR Remake or maybe even a new Age..? ;)

We have a classic here, you shouldn't forget that when playing. That means some graphic may not be the best for nowadays, there are even still some graphic bugs (f.eks. Stoneship Island light fluctuation when turning on power) and the models haven't been redesigned in a satisfying way. I immediately used the "turn on old videos" option instead of looking at these "monstrosities". Sadly this doesn't apply to the ending scenes.
Then again all in all the graphics are nice to look at, I imagine it must be mind blowing in VR.

I used to try solving Myst as a kid, don't remember if I actually managed to push through it without help, but I strongly assume I didn't. So the riddles take some time and brainwork, at least at the start I was kinda lost of what to do next. Once you figure out the main key to progress further it pushes you on exploring. One puzzle was really not that nice to solve (has to do with mathematics and got me pretty frustated - when the solution was very different of what I expected - took one hint there online) but everything else was doable and I don't think too easy.
Yes the railway ride is kinda painful, but well.. a lot of riddles don't only rely on your optical input, lets say it like that. Also I drew a nice map on paper.

The price of the game is too high though imo, 30$ is just too much for some hours of gameplay (depending on how long you need to find the solutions - I made 100% achievements in not even 13h, dunno how long I had been afk running the game in background and reading the books etc). I would buy it in a pack with Riven or wait for a bigger discount.