It is difficult to fully and fairly explain why I am negatively rating this game without creating a wall of text. If you look you will see many players with large amounts of time invested giving a negative rating. The main issue being that much of the gameplay and mechanics are locked behind that large time investment. You cannot really fully play the game until you waste a huge upfront amount of time in grinding either for money or materials and then finishing the campaign at which time a few more items becomes unlocked.
If this game were trimmed down to the core aspects I think it would actually be rated higher. But it clear the developers were building something much grander, probably had the rug pulled out from under them, but then whats left is a game where the primary component that is largely, but not completely, fleshed out is trapped beyond alot of empty, tedious, grinding.
No Manual Save System
You cannot manually save. In exploration mode which is the main way you gather money and materials to build your fortress there is no way to manually save. If something happens before you leave all that time is lost. The most likely event is you, your guardians, loot, or even things like Titan spikes fall through the upper game meshes and become lost or inaccessible. I've had all of these happen. If your character gets stuck somewhere sometimes you can remotely end exploration but sometimes you can't which means exiting the game and starting back at the beginning again.
The big pain is if during recovery day something goes wonky and results in killing you. All that tedious boring grinding down the drain now because there is no manual save system. The dumb thing is the game is actually making saves at : C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\U01\Saved\SaveGames\ with GamesaveData.sav being the latest one. If you need to you can restore from an earlier save by replacing that file with one from the SaveBackup folder with a .bak extension.
Tedious Game Loop
Until you finish the campaign or unlock some of the other game modes the main way you earn money or find materials is Exploration mode. You go to a site, energy is spent getting there, the map is procedurally generated, all the enemies there are dumb and extremely weak, and you just mindlessly loot from a few locations. What you immediately realize is almost every map is nearly the same at the core with not alot of variation. Sure it might be raining on one and snowing on another but there are only a handful of different buildings and you will repeat them immediately over and over again. I'm sure the developers had bigger plans for this, the video they show at the end of the campaign certainly suggested it but its a boring unrewarding cycle you might grind through just to finish the campaign and get to the part of play you bought the game for.
Empty Game
It becomes obvious very quickly most of the game is the basic framework that never got to be filled up with content. The main base only has a few speaking NPCs yet its huge and you can run all around it. However, during the entire game there are sections that never did anything. I don't think anything ever appeared in the Logistics section for me to interact with. Same with the Armory area. Fortunately bring up the Map with M and you can navigate through alot of this directly in Menus or teleport between areas.
Needless Punishments, Time Gating, and More Missing parts
The main protagonist character is unequivocally the worst character you can use in the game. He has the fewest traits and you can quickly max him out. You can get new operatives through different means yet the game needlessly makes them expendable both through direct gameplay or sending them on missions. Making this worse is you cannot customize any of these characters. You're given characters based on a gacha type system where the traits and talents available are randomized. Imagine wasting hours trying to get the ideal character just to have them permanently die without you realizing they would permanently die. Much later in the game there are beacons you can buy that guarantee they will be returned to the base on death but its not mentioned before hand and just luck if they show up in the shop. There is no need for this nonsense. Just let people pick their talents based on points like any sane game. Adding to the nonsense is its broken. Some characters you can max out and have points left over with nothing to apply them to. Others you suddenly find yourself without enough points to finish. There is also one talent Steelbody that appears to be completely broken. I could not put points into it in any operative. If an operative dies you can use the "hidden" backup files mentioned earlier to restore an earlier save point.
Speaking about the shop again instead of just offering you everything to buy up front it has a pointless refresh system. Except for 1 seller all the sellers can have their inventory refreshed for a few so you sit there and waste time constantly refreshing just to find the materials or things you need.
Loot is Garbage
Loot is broken down to basically Gear - which is your armor and weapons which can only be sold for Insurance points, Valuables which can be sold for money, Tech Points, and Research points. During exploration mode for most of the game 80% of the time enemies don't drop anything. The 20% of the time they do its the same lowest tier junk material. Near end of campaign some enemies do finally start dropping gear but it still tends to be junk. On top of that Gear can only be sold for Insurance points. Another needless pain mechanism where you can permanently lose your gear if your character dies. So you have to insure it. Overwhelmingly what gets dropped when anything gets dropped is Tech points and occasionally collars from Chasers. These Tech points quickly become close to useless because you just don't need them anymore. The material you really need, the stuff to build your fortress is never dropped by 99% of the enemies. It has to be looted from locations and if you do the Instant option in exploration mode you miss most of the loot including the rarer items you need for your fortress. After a point you realize almost of this stuff is junk and its wasting your time trying to manage it so you can build a dismantler and turn it into gold at a steep penalty just so its not wasting so much space.
Good Stuff
Lets not be all negative. I think the developers were very competent but something happened and this game clearly was not finished.
Weapon Systems / Player combat.
I really, really like the weapons system where you have many layers that can create unique effects. There are the morphs, then the booster modification, then the weapon parts and gear modifiers, and then finally the character talents that all combine to produce different results. I felt like the main character moved swiftly and I liked how there was an in game display on the weapon to show what Xens were being used. It's unfortunate there isn't much opportunity in the game for real single player combat. I never felt like during Recovery I could spend much time in Real Time without something going wrong and needing managed in Slow Mode.
Detailed Menu System.
Not perfect but they really put alot of work into the menu system. Considering how many different gaming systems they tried to cram into this game it could've been a lot worse.
Summary - because I've hit the limit
Empty, repetitive maps and needless punishment systems get in the way of the core gameplay system. A fleshed out Sequel would be interesting but not a day 1 purchase. You can get enjoyment out of this game just a heads up of the requisite time investment.
Windows 11
4070 Ti
96 GB RAM
