Review: Mixed.

The art, setting, voice acting, anomaly design, and concept are exceptional. No notes. These had me hooked from the beginning and are the reason I kept playing to the end.

The gameplay has some great bits, but it's also super grindy and repetitive. You have to repeatedly drive through the same low-level zones with every expedition, and unlocking a new zone on the world map requires doing a full trip through all the early zones to first scout out the path, then another trip to actually get to the new zone. You'll spend hours driving just for the sake of unlocking bits of the map so that you can progress the story or get to higher-level zones. This. Is. So. Boring.

Late-game you get an upgrade that promises to let you skip some of the redundant travel. It barely helps. It just converts the easy zones into straight-line highway zones. They have almost no content in them, and take 2-3 minutes to drive through. It still takes a long time just to get past the low-level zones to the level-appropriate areas, and you have to do this over and over.

The pacing is bad. There was one period where I didn't get any story progression for 5 hours because of a couple deaths and all that repeated travel (and preparing for it). Then once I got used to blitzing through the boring bits, the ending came all at once. Even though I did a LOT of scavenging, apparently I found less than 1/3rd of the collectables & audio logs. I would have loved to pimp out my car and hear those audio logs, the customization was neat and the story was pretty intriguing, but I'm not spending another 40 hours after the ending hunting for them.

Do I recommend it? Only if you have time to burn and you're ok with lots of grind. The setting is amazing, but by the end I just wanted to skip the gameplay to see the end of the story.

Review: Mixed. The art, setting, voice acting, anomaly design, and concept are exceptional. No notes. These had me hooked from the beginning and are the reason I kept playing to the end. The gameplay has some great bits, but it's also super grindy and repetitive. You have to repeatedly drive through the same low-level zones with every expedition, and unlocking a new zone on the world map requires doing a full trip through all the early zones to first scout out the path, then another trip to actually get to the new zone. You'll spend hours driving just for the sake of unlocking bits of the map so that you can progress the story or get to higher-level zones. [b][u]This. Is. So. Boring.[/u][/b] Late-game you get an upgrade that promises to let you skip some of the redundant travel. It barely helps. [spoiler]It just converts the easy zones into straight-line highway zones. They have almost no content in them, and take 2-3 minutes to drive through.[/spoiler] It still takes a long time just to get past the low-level zones to the level-appropriate areas, and you have to do this over and over. The pacing is bad. There was one period where I didn't get any story progression for 5 hours because of a couple deaths and all that repeated travel (and preparing for it). Then once I got used to blitzing through the boring bits, the ending came all at once. Even though I did a LOT of scavenging, apparently I found less than 1/3rd of the collectables & audio logs. I would have loved to pimp out my car and hear those audio logs, the customization was neat and the story was pretty intriguing, but I'm not spending another 40 hours after the ending hunting for them. Do I recommend it? Only if you have time to burn and you're ok with lots of grind. The setting is amazing, but by the end I just wanted to skip the gameplay to see the end of the story.