Its not for me.

I am a little surprised how positively reviewed this game is. Ill try and break it down by parts:

Story - It feels very much like a persons first world building for a custom D&D game setting. In person, you can ask a question that the person probably never thought of, but seems obvious to you, and they give you answer. In a video game, that cant happen. There are a lot of eye brow raising logic in the way people behave that is hard to really take anything seriously. The corporations are comically evil, and everyone is just okay with it. like you would suspect there to be much more dissent in the populous the way they are treated and arbitrary penalties. Its a culture where Mass suicide would make sense because no sane person would look at the world and want to keep participating in it.

It has the same kind of energy of a horror movie where there is clearly a knife welding killer in the house and the characters all just kind of wander around in their undies saying "Hellllllo?". Just destroys any verisimilitude of taking the world seriously because the people don't act or behave like people. its a big pet peeve of mine.

Writing/Dialog - I found this to be pretty lack-luster too. There was never really a character I enjoyed. Similar to above with most of the characters - they seem unable to grasp that the corporation is clearly evil. Every one behaves like they need help using a microwave, or use only Velcro shoes. Even the 'smart' characters seem a bit too dumb. The dialog options are usually like:

1) Progress quest
2) Some boring world building in which the person will boot lick the corporations again
3) some other question which will end in a 2 word reply
4) leave

There may be some branching dialog, but I never found any of it interesting to listen to or surprising. it was all very 'meh'.

Every quest felt the same. It always person A tell you Person B is bad, but wont really tell you why or elaborate on it, usually some paper thin reasoning. you talk to Person B and they say the same but provide proof of person A. You confront Person A and they have this like scooby-doo monologue "I would have gotten away with it!" or something similar. All of the quests are like this.

gameplay/gunplay - I found the combat to be difficult until about level 4 or 5. at which point you get way better weapons and the combat becomes much easier. There is also this whole thing they are trying to sell you on when you play the game called something like "Taking flaws". basically when you are playing the game the way you like, pop ups will occur outside of combat when something happens, like you took 200 acid damage total, or something like that. It will ask you if you would like to take a flaw. The flaw will give you a negative to the way you currently play in circumstances related to the pop up - like when you take acid damage you have -1 perception and 10% more weapon sway etc - for 1 perk point. Normally you get 1 perk point every 2 levels, and the perks are very disappointing. There was never one I was excited for, or looking forward to getting. whenever I had to select a perk, it was always kind of a chore to find the least bad one / most helpful. Some example of perks are like "walk speed is 25% faster", "Carry weight is 30kg more", "you can move faster in slowmo mode". Nothing that gave me the feeling of "Wow! this will help me I cant wait to try it" It was really just for fixing inconveniences which, honestly, probably should have just been fixed without the need of perk points. The walking is slow, just make the default 25% faster.

You get companions, you can take 2 with you out of a selection of 6. They are all very bland. No one really had an interesting story. There is a crisis of faith priest who is/was a criminal - it was not totally clear to me. A gay engineer who wants a girlfriend. Doctor with daddy issues. The guy who gets fired from minimum wage jobs wants to me find his friend he has not heard from in a while. And Lady who wants to bury her old friends.

I don't think I am being too unfair with their characterisations because they felt very 1 dimensional. to be fair I used mainly doctor with daddy issues and Gay engieer who wants GF real bad. They seem to try and do something like give the companions an "arc" in that they will bring up the same issues and stuff when you go outside of the ship. They also interact with each other when you enter the ship, but there seems to be like only 10 interactions when you enter the ship, and you will enter the ship a lot. The ship will inform you they are interacting when you want to go anywhere it becomes quite annoying.

Similarly annoying is that every companion has a special combat ability, and they shout 1 line every time you use it. some characters have a stun or do damage or something - its usually useful, so you will be using it a lot! I heard the same line like 25 times and I just muted the game. I had the companion for only their "companion missions" which was total like 1 hour it sucked. "AYYYYYAAAAGGHHHHYYYYY" please don't do this, i just need your damage. When you use their ability the camera pans on them and you have to watch them use their power for like 3-5 seconds which is also annoying when you are in a gun fight.

I just really did not enjoy the game so much. I felt like I was being hit over the head with ideas that are not subtle but the game thinks is. I don't know if its a case of "But the players wont get it unless we spell it out for them 3-5 times" I get it, the corporation is evil, but can they have a better reason? There is a "Twist" at the end, but it changes nothing and is not interesting. Your perspective on the factions should not shift at the revelations. I will spoil it to give you the whole deal and save you 10-15 hours of play. There are 2 twists. First is that they are starving due to the food not being nourishing enough. You think you would notice you are starving pretty soon. Their solutions is to kill all the guys already in frozen hyper sleep and put the current population in frozen hyper sleep. Pretty stupid. The second twist is it turns out earth is not responding - maybe destroyed to the colony messages. I mean what would they do if it was not destroyed, surely they are aware of the colony's work and approve of it. Typically a colony would send goods to the home world and have some communication. So even if they are not destroyed - they surely don't care about the suffering of the people. it changes nothing. . Overall its okay, but very disappointed its a 5 or 6/10 for me.

It's a good game but not as good as you'd expect for an Obsidian game.
Bit of a let down really. Also unfortunately short.

Note: Beaten on Game Pass

This game is only better than Starfield by this much 🤏 because its not plagued by insanely stupid mechanics and a million loading screens. This game is equally as mediocre and lame in almost every single way.

This game at its very core is just “guys its fallout but we made it our own thing 🙂." Except its missing practically every single aspect of what makes Fallout so appealing.

There's a very limited amount of quests to do in this game and all of the planet's maps are also very small and limited, really not allowing the player to explore and walk around very much at all to find anything interesting.

The combat is genuinely worse than Fallout 4, people were coping mad hard after getting burned by Bethesda after FO4 and 76. The controls feel incredibly stiff with really clunky animations and recoil. The bootleg VATS is also just bullet time lol, it is incredibly uninspired.

Despite being an RPG, the world in this game is so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ bad, it's insane. I don’t know what Obsidian was trying to make the audience feel when making this game other than “corporations are evil!”

Genuinely, the first big choice you make in this game is choosing between a generic, corrupt corporation- run town or a group of deserters that take human bodies and decompose them so they can grow plants.

Bro, just because you make the player choose between two evils doesn’t make it good writing. Both sides are cartoonishly stupid and have almost no redeemable qualities at all. The corporations are unbelievably dumb because the writers didn’t want to compromise the player from being drilled in the head with the idea that CORPORATIONS ARE EVIL! It's so shallow and boring, just like the rest of the game itself.

That's the thing too, the corporations that are supposed to be evil and control like every area in the game are some of the dumbest people alive. Like the mayor in Edgewater denying that only eating fake canned tuna isn't related to the entire ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ town becoming sick?! Or maybe the fact that even in slogans its all done to make fun of how mediocre the corporations are.

Like with Spacer's Choice's motto being "It's not the best choice, it's Spacer's Choice!" and also how an endless amount of NPCs in this game will say ♥♥♥♥ like "Erm, I'll have you know that our surgery success rate has increased to a solid 58% succces rate!" Like bro we get it, corporations are evil and dumb lol.

But because of this narrative, none of the NPCs feel like actual human beings, they feel like puppets that just exist to reinforce the idea of corporations being dumb. It’s shoved into your face constantly and even if it's supposed to be satire, it's all this game is. The only issue is that this game is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ RPG where I’m supposed to be immersed and care about the world but how can I do that when the writer’s purposefully make every NPC so dumb and one dimensional to reinforce a shallow narrative?!

I genuinely hate how this game looks aesthetically too. Like some of this the environments and cities can look kind of cool I guess but I hate how all the NPCs and technology look.

Every female NPC has the same butch lesbian haircut and every man will all have the same face too with maybe some stupid steampunk cosplay looking ass mustache on their face. This game aesthetically looks like a redditor's wet dream. How the ♥♥♥♥ did Obsidian manage to make every NPC look so ugly and all look the same when they're working with UE4?! It's genuinely insane.

This game is one of the most forgettable games I've ever played in my entire life. The only reason people still talk about this game is because its made by Obsidian and they made New Vegas (the best game ever) even though barely any of the original devs that worked on New Vegas actually worked on Outer Worlds.