For the love of GOD: do not get this at full price or anything less than a 50% discount, you will almost certainly regret it. Having gotten it at half price I'm still torn on whether the game represented any real value for money, even in its current state.
The core gameplay loop is tedious busy work and quest marker hell. Knowing about the game's development was a clear detriment in this respect, as I quickly became painfully aware of how I was spending precious hours of my life on what is essentially a visual skin over a noise function. At least when you're grinding away in a Far Cry game, you're interacting with hand-crafted content that hundreds of people labored on for years. Here you are doing the exact same thing you do between missions in those games, only what you see on screen is all generated at run-time using some nerd's fancy Perlin noise algorithm. The more you think about it the more disconcerting it becomes.
The sheer idiocy that the game's systems generates and expect you take at face value is staggering. We're talking swimmable liquid oceans on planets with 130 degree or deep sub-zero temperatures, vibrant plant life and mammalian fauna on planets with little to no water... the list goes on and on. Every space station and point of interest is not just very similar, but completely identical, up to and including the placement of chests and other interactable items. The repeating patterns become obvious quickly, contributing immensely to the overall sense of tedium and despair that sinks in after a few hours with the game.
Yet, as I've progressed through the story I have to concede that it has kept introducing new systems and switching things up, enough for me to be compelled to continue as a sort of ambient activity when I'm too tired to do other things. At around twenty hours, I'm still getting new hooks introduced around the core loop, and have started seeing new varieties of alien life pop up that are significantly different from the mammal analogues that have populated the game until this point.
I don't know if the devs really believe their pablum about the game somehow being about the "joy of discovery" or whatever. In any case the game is not about that at all. It is certainly an interesting exercise in... something, but that something seems more like a variation of the dumbed-down gambler/collector loop that powers most of today's open-world time sinks. Like these games, it consumes a lot of your time and gives almost nothing in return. And unlike those games, you don't get to absorb the energy of intent and artistic flair from all the effort that goes into their production. One and half stars. May update if I ever manage to complete it.
The core gameplay loop is tedious busy work and quest marker hell. Knowing about the game's development was a clear detriment in this respect, as I quickly became painfully aware of how I was spending precious hours of my life on what is essentially a visual skin over a noise function. At least when you're grinding away in a Far Cry game, you're interacting with hand-crafted content that hundreds of people labored on for years. Here you are doing the exact same thing you do between missions in those games, only what you see on screen is all generated at run-time using some nerd's fancy Perlin noise algorithm. The more you think about it the more disconcerting it becomes.
The sheer idiocy that the game's systems generates and expect you take at face value is staggering. We're talking swimmable liquid oceans on planets with 130 degree or deep sub-zero temperatures, vibrant plant life and mammalian fauna on planets with little to no water... the list goes on and on. Every space station and point of interest is not just very similar, but completely identical, up to and including the placement of chests and other interactable items. The repeating patterns become obvious quickly, contributing immensely to the overall sense of tedium and despair that sinks in after a few hours with the game.
Yet, as I've progressed through the story I have to concede that it has kept introducing new systems and switching things up, enough for me to be compelled to continue as a sort of ambient activity when I'm too tired to do other things. At around twenty hours, I'm still getting new hooks introduced around the core loop, and have started seeing new varieties of alien life pop up that are significantly different from the mammal analogues that have populated the game until this point.
I don't know if the devs really believe their pablum about the game somehow being about the "joy of discovery" or whatever. In any case the game is not about that at all. It is certainly an interesting exercise in... something, but that something seems more like a variation of the dumbed-down gambler/collector loop that powers most of today's open-world time sinks. Like these games, it consumes a lot of your time and gives almost nothing in return. And unlike those games, you don't get to absorb the energy of intent and artistic flair from all the effort that goes into their production. One and half stars. May update if I ever manage to complete it.