Written five days after Odyssey's release:

It's not THAT bad.

OK... It's bad.. Frontier really botched the release. They took it out of the oven too soon. They do deserve much of the negative feedback they are getting. But Odyssey does not deserve Overwhelmingly Negative. The bottom line is... I'm having a lot of fun. My expectations were realistic. I was not expecting to get amazing. I am well-familiar with Frontier's release patterns by now. Odyssey is a skeletal framework on which Frontier will add features and further refine as time goes on. They do this every time.

So my advice to you is either buy it now and enjoy it for what it is, or wait a few months. It will get better.

------------------

The New Planet Tech

I am impressed. Not every planet looks amazing. Some places look like the Rocky Mountains, while other places look like vast salt flats. If you think a planet looks bland, just visit a different planet. Some have weird shading like the gamma is off. It will likely be fixed in time.

The On-Foot Combat

It's a mixed bag. On-foot enemies are kind of like ships with legs. You need one weapon to take down their shields, and another weapon to damage their tender flesh. Enemy shields recharge very quickly if you don't take them down after their shields go down. The constant weapon swapping is kind of annoying.

I don't know if head shots deal any additional damage yet. So far it feels like it doesn't. My un-upgraded weapons have a massive fire spread so it is difficult to test.

The upgrade grind is fairly ridiculous. Each suit and weapon has it's own recipe of required ingredients to upgrade them. These ingredients are items you steal from outposts (while nobody is looking). The items you find are semi-random. Some are randomized, but other crucial ingredients are only found in certain places.

If you add an attachment to a weapon (such as a scope), you can not remove it. You can buy two of the same weapon so one can have a scope while the other does not. I know.. It is dumb.

Stealth needs work. You cannot hide bodies or create distractions. I am not too hopeful these kinds of issues will be resolved any time soon but who knows.

Odyssey has a new console-style selection wheel. I would prefer not to use it, but certain items are ONLY accessible via this control. They chose not to assign keystroke commands to using a health pack or recharging your suit. Baffling. Using Voice Attack I was able to create voice-activated macros that can do these things without having to mess with the selection wheel.

The combat zones are basically Star Wars Battlefront and that is just grand. More modes would be welcome.

The Plant Scanning

I haven't tried it yet. I am glad they got rid of the spinning rings mini-game. That was also really dumb.

The Performance Issue

My 960 GPU is lower than the minimum recommended specs. After I turned down a few settings such as ambient occlusion and shadow quality, I get a fairly decent frame rate most of the time at 1280x720. Stations on fire really make my frame rate tank. There have been three update patches so far. It has improved each time. I'm sure it will continue to improve.

------------

In summary all I can say is I am having a lot of fun with it. There are design decisions I don't like and it runs a bit klunky but I still will give this a thumbs-up. You can enjoy it if you set your expectations to "Frontier".

------------------

EDIT May 28 2021: A day after I wrote this review, FDev put out a 6 gigabyte update and for me performance improved dramatically. Planet gamma issues resolved as well.