Would be thumbs up if cheaper, just wait for it to go on sale. Very repetitive, a lot of highs, a lot of lows, messy pacing, but enough interesting things to keep you going. Paints both communism and capitalism as bad if you cared about that. There's actually quite a bit of robot girls.



Beat the game on normal in about 16 hours. See literally no reason to replay unless I want to just look at stuff.



The good:

The music is definitely the highlight. At its best it's really good and exciting, at its worst it's still interesting. Which is better than forgettable imo

interesting setting and visuals

Story is decent, nothing mind-blowing. There are a few things that don't make sense, but there is still setup and payoff within the narrative

I felt the difficulty was fine throughout. I was never on autopilot when in combat. There are certain perks that are a must have and you definitely feel the progression. I found myself wanting to avoid combat near the start, but not at all near the end.





The bad:

Probably the biggest issue: pacing pacing pacing. It made no sense. They tried to do what Bioshock Infinite did with seeing Columbia all nice and pretty and happy before things go wrong, except not as well. You sit through what is basically an interactive cut scene with on-the-nose exposition and a lot of NPCs going "wow, it sure is amazing that we have such amazing science in [city name] thanks to [name] and their [invention] that recently came out." After this you arrive in the open world to go to the first mission. I then spent 4 hours on this first mission. Then back to the open world for 10 minutes to get to the next story mission. Then another 2-3 hours on that. Then everything gets shorter on average afterwards. The first half of the game has so many puzzles that you would think it was a puzzle game first before a FPS, but then the last half of the game has literally no puzzles so idk. It's a mess.

The game is "open world" in that there is a world that you can explore (kinda), but there isn't really anything to do other than collect weapon blueprints and kill robots. The "open world" only stands as a set piece to get from story mission to story mission. I spent maybe an hour total in the open world, and I was really trying to find interesting things to do. There was a point in which I wanted to travel to get an upgrade for a weapon only to find that the entire section of the map was cut off and had to progress through the story to open it up. There wasn't even any indication that I opened it up when I did. The combat cycle for the open world can just be ignored. There are sometimes just too many enemies in a given location. Like, you will scan the area and there's 30 things on your screen with lines connecting them and then they just keep adding more and more as you progress through the story.

There are lines of dialog that are just bad. Not even like "oh that could have been better". More like "I wish i didn't have to listen to that". You kinda get used to it though. Or maybe it just improved a bit over the course of the game

Unbelievably repetitive. Very little enemy variety. Only (one)? dead soldier model. You will spend hours collecting things to put into other things to open doors and then open some variation of three lock types on a door to again collect things to open another door and then talk to an unmoving dead body. Each time you fight some amount of the 6 or 7 enemy types. The game also tries to be funny with it by having the MC literally say something like "Wow, another lock on the door. Who would have seen that coming?", or "Yeah, of course I have to go collect more capsules. What else could it have possibly been?". As though that makes this type of game design excusable.

The first boss fight was ok. Like probably the best moment of the game. Then all other boss fights are boring