I wanted to enjoy this game, and did for a good chunk of the starting zone, Arizona, but eventually came to realize that, for a CRPG that is supposed to have choice and consequence, it sort of forces a lot of consequence upon you without you really having much of a choice to have avoided it to begin with.
One of the most egregious examples of this comes towards the tail-end of your initial exploration of Arizona as a Ranger whose mission is to protect and serve. You go on this long chain of quests to confront an organized gang of hooligans who have made a prison complex into their home, who call themselves the "Red Skorpon Militia," or RSM for short. They're essentially a group of thieves, murderers, and r^pists (goats are even targeted for such apparently) who want to be known as the new law around Arizona, trying to disestablish the Rangers and undermine their authority.
You get a quest from your dispatcher to go and speak to them, to either establish some neutral ground or perhaps form an alliance or just outright deal with them through the deliverance of death. It's truly your choice. At this point.
You get this quest early on and so once you have the proper protection from the radiation that inconveniently gatekeeps you from having free reign of the world map, you enter this area and immediately see that regular citizens are struggling despite some RSM propaganda being broadcast about their town being called "Happy Valley." They're being taxed, quite literally to death, by the RSM. Farms and equipment have been destroyed and in their stead, the RSM have monopolized farming by allowing only one grand farm to exist. There's a man burying his wife who questioned the RSM about being charged an "untilled field tax" and how they could plow their field since they couldn't afford their "property insurance" to which the RSM took away their equipment, etc. So they shot her.
By this point, my mind was pretty much already made up. These people need our help, and they need the RSM eradicated. So you press forward and come to a scene of a few RSM people and their 'assessor' harassing and bullying a woman who couldn't pay a fine for crying because she was starving and didn't have enough "Skorpion scrip" (their special currency) to afford food. The assessor demands you pay $100 to keep your weaponry, and so I shot and killed them all and decided to go through the rest of the map killing the RSM as I decided that their commander, Danforth, the man I was supposed to either meet with or kill anyway, wouldn't live, either.
Except as you come to the prison gates, you're blocked off from entry due to indestructible turrets that also one-shot you. There isn't any other method to gaining entrance into his prison facility, either. You have to go across the world map to a whole different area just to find some tank treads to repair a tank that can destroy the turrets for you while also doing another quest line to attach a repeater to a radio tower to better restore communications across the wasteland. So you do that, as it's the only way to progress, and then come back to see that everybody has been killed by the RSM. One of the dudes at the farm, Jobe, says that he poisoned Danforth's dogs, to which Danforth assumed it was the Rangers, and so he sends people out to murder everybody outside of the prison facility. The same people you wanted to save from their wrath to begin with. Doing the main questline to attach repeaters to radio towers is what triggers this event, and the game did not inform you or even give you any sort of hint that doing this quest would result in what is basically a consequence. There's no saving this town as the dogs HAVE to be poisoned, to which people HAVE to die. Only then can you get the cure from Jobe and inform Danforth that you can cure his dogs, to which you'll gain access finally, or you can repair the tank to destroy the turrets.
This was infuriating for me because the game makes you visit the prison/Happy Valley first, and you can't travel to the other town (Damonta) to find the treads for the tank until you meet up with a specific NPC in Happy Valley who gives you a radiation suit to travel to Damonta. The game misleads you into this idea that you're going to get to save the town, liberate them from the terrors of the RSM, except you don't get that choice because it locks you out of fighting Danforth until much later on. You can only avenge the citizens. It doesn't matter if you were diplomatic and cooperative with the RSM or what. The dogs get poisoned inevitably and you get the blame.
And this isn't the only terrible example, but I'm not going to go down the list as half of this review was already complaining about the lack of freedom in a game that claims you have it. Just keep in mind: you don't. You are shoehorned into a lot of consequences that are unavoidable or just badly hinted at.
When it comes to character customization, you're presented with the option to creating four characters to be part of your team. You can meet and add other NPCs to your team as you play through the game as well, but you start out as a 4-man team. Or 1 man and 3 women because if you aren't giving yourself a harem then you're just playing video games wrong. The choices here are overwhelming, however; and you don't really know what to even choose between skill proficiency and your character's attributes, acronymized as C.L.A.S.S.I.C. You have your selection of combat skills (shotguns, snipers, melee, etc), knowledge skills (medic, lockpicking, demolitions, etc) and general skills (bartering, perception, animal speaking, etc). There's about ten different skills in each category, give or take.
My idea was to try and create a diverse team of specialists as I assumed that was a good idea, where one person would use SMGs, one person would use sniper rifles, one person would use assault rifles, etc. I gave one medic skills for healing, had one who knew how to lockpick, so on and so on. You find out, though, that many of the skills are useless or underutilized and that the meta is very obviously to just use assault rifles and sniper rifles because SMGs and shotguns have no range to them, meaning that you have to run up to your opponents in almost melee range to properly use these weapon types. As you level up, you unlock perk points that can be used to remove CQC penalties on weapons designed for longer range combat like sniper rifles and assault rifles, allowing you to use them for both close and long range combat, effectively nullifying the point of anything that would specialize with close range. The perk system is new to the Director's Cut version of the game but the developer's implementation of it actually made a lot of weapons obsolete with certain perks.
There's a skill for "toaster repair" as well, which I selected for one of my characters because I thought it could be funny, but it turned out that the skill is really just there 'for the lulz' because the developers didn't bother rewarding you for choosing it and hunting down the toasters that are in need of repair.
When it comes to attributes, even some of these are not worth investing too many points into. Giving your characters a lot of intelligence means that they can apparently be a sort of "skill mule" and unlock more skills than character lacking in it, and they also get bonus XP gains and more skill points per level. Some of my characters would only get about 3 skill points for a level-up so it'd take a few levels before I could even upgrade anything because the skills eventually start to cost over 12 points. Luck and charisma are basically useless and not worth investing points into, except getting charisma to 6 for whoever you assigned the leadership skill to. It's just very easy to design a team that isn't that great because it's not at all that balanced.
By the end, it was less of an RPG game with choice and punishment and just a basic turn-based shooter.
