Recent reviews by AciD

Good stuff. You go play for five minutes and it it's midnight already.

The game has like 3 major cities you can visit, few smaller outposts and a bunch of space stations. Everything else is about 10 different assets spawned on any other of the "1000 exiting planets to visit".

General questing is a somewhat dull - it Bethesda's game design that might have been good in games a decade ago - at this point if feels really dated. Most quests are either visit a guy and talk to them in order to get some quest item (possibly negotiate with perks) and return to quest giver OR shoot everyone in a dungeon until you get to a container with an item that has ◇ next to it, and yeah...return it to the quest giver.

Another thing related to that is how you travel - the space ships are pretty much fast travel machines - the entire space is a fake facade to pretend there is any depth to it. Any location, planet or station has to be reached using fast travel. There is no option to really "fly" anywhere as you would expect in a space game. When you are in space, you are essentially stuck in a bubble and cannot move anywhere, even if you are in orbit of a planet.

Some game director there also decided to throw in the Outposts system which is almost a carbon copy of what you know from Fallout 4 and others - in this case it is an absolute gold sink. Option to store items has been removed - this means that if you want to move something or use it later, you can't - it is destroyed when you move it. Early game seems to suggests to you that outposts have to be used upgrade weapons or ships - fortunately this is not the case. All of the required resources can be purchased from vendors - which you probably should do if you value your sanity. Outposts are difficult to connect to each other and generally manage - getting into building them is all in all a humongous waste of time.

Shooting and looting part of the game is somewhat good, but not exiting or anywhere innovative, I would say that it is the most positive aspect of the game.

Finally, the bugs the glitches and others - at the end of 100%, no stone unturned kind of run, I had 5 quests stuck due to bugs, 3 of them where due to the fact that the fast travel system would send me to a ship in orbit that was my objective...that wasn't there.

I fortunately got the game from the AMD CPU promo - the price tag for this thing is way too high. I'd likely be pretty unhappy if I were to pay full price for this thing.

The talking heads at Bethesda mention adding regular space flight (and no fast travel everywhere) in future updates, but at the current pace we will have to wait year or more. At this point, we got DLSS, option to directly eat food, plus a FOV slider over the course of about 4 months.

To sum it up, don't buy this thing unless it's 75% off or enough updates were released over the span of a decade this game "is supposed to be played" according to the guys at the big B.

And yeah, it's a really nice monument to the fact that we should not listen to con men like Todd Howard and rest of their band when they spew out the b/s on how great and revolutionary their upcoming products are.
For the claim of having this game in development of seven years, it feels like it was an almost absolutely wasted time as virtually any mechanic other than ship combat is trickled down from their previous titles, including skills and perks that hardly make sense in space.

It works and it's shiney.

It's a really fun game overall.Combat is minimal, despite the trailer showing action sequences.Story is pretty heavy as police investigations go, however it is quite fun and interesting.As many players pointed out, some characters just end up having too much dialogue about the world, socioeconomic issues, while the game does not have enough storytelling canvas to properly back up and explore these problems. Smaller NPCs often have huge discussions or agendas that hardly add to the story besides coloring the background. Having replayed some of the scenes, it turns out that dialogue tree branches out vastly in conversations just to end up with same outcomes, despite seemingly different responses from your character. Detective and his way of solving problems can change with your decisions, however general outcome of many encounters will not vary much besides the classical passed/failed. The skills system and its rolls for failure/pass somewhat encourage quicksaving and loading just for the sake of exploring all options - it seems to undermine the general character development. If there are no hard checks, just percentages based on your level of that skill, why not reload it 5 times, right!Worth picking up.

Testing

Seattle simulator exploring the case where tech gigants decided not to settle down in Washington.

Now seriously, It was okay-ish.

Starts really good then starts spinning down towards boring end. Gets caught up in bad puzzles where you must use derivatives of moves you learned earlier - catch is, they seem pretty impossible physically. As you progress throught the game you end up repeating numerous times puzzle sequences that require a timely use of specific actions/combinations of moves - if you fail, instakill and repeat.
Story is somewhat average - 1/3 of the game is a boring episode disconnected from main plot that someone pushed inside the game storyline and glued the ends together to make it fit with entire story arc.
Good asthetics and looks - game has a nice sinking theme of apocalpyse.

Great story and lots of side missions what will take hours out of your life. Great change from urban territories of Fallout 3. Game has an abandoned wild west feeling, rather than overwhelming feel of totally destroyed capital city. Enjoyable desert environments with new enemies to meet and greet. Huge selection of weapons, plus system that allows you to improve your weapons thru modding. Game has multiple factions where neither of them is outright "good" guys. All of them are in varying shade of grey. What more to say? Another great episode in the simulation of post-apocalyptic human behavior. Get it now!