God, there's so much I like here but the whole thing just feels half-baked. I like the combat but it never meaningfully evolves past the first hour, I like the enemies but they show you all the interesting ones in the first third then just throw basic ones at you for the rest of the game (the final boss is just a boring bullet sponge you shoot for ten minutes until it falls over), the world and environments are atmospheric but feel like such a generic sci-fi setting with nothing interesting or unique about it, and worst of all is the story.

It genuinely feels like entire hours of story must have been cut from the game, every single character has one trait each, 0 seconds of development, and there are entire visual motifs that feel like holdovers from cut content (the jack-in-the-box HAS to have been a bigger part of the game in cut content, and the co-pilot that appears like twice and has no bearing on anything), it just feels like there were all these ideas and they either had to cut them or couldn't be bothered to do more than the bare minimum, not just with the story but with every single aspect of the game. The combat, progression, music and story all just feel like entire teams were just doing the absolute minimum to justify calling itself a AAA-style game.

It's not all bad, the types of levels have plenty of variety, the combat feels satisfying when you hit and dodge and block, and the gameplay is well paced, it's just a shame the story is not because it largely doesn't exist.

Was hoping I'd like this more on a replay, and I mostly feel the same, it's worth playing if you can get it on sale for like 20, but other than that I just can't recommend it in good faith. I will say that the PS5 is preferable over PC, it looks better (other than the shadows) and the controller additions from the Dualsense are... Cool.

I hope in future this studio takes their clear dev talent and puts it toward something they actually care about.