Sadly, I don't have room for the 20,000+ words necessary to describe in painstakingly intricate and unnecessarily obsessive detail every aspect of the game that managed to disappoint or irritate me. Perhaps an excessive amount of verbiage to waste on a game that only took 20 hours to complete in any case. So, I'll sum up my entire experience with by analogy to a small spoiler regarding one of the companions (Erritis). Now, this guy is the only character I managed to care even a little about. Aligern is a massive asshole with no backbone in him to save his life. Callistege is much the same. Matkina has no personality at all. Tybir is a weak, cowardly traitor who sold out his own friend and deserves death. Rhin is the helpless girl equivalent of a $2 hooker, written with all the subtlety and nuance of a brick to the face. Which left only Erritis. Now, he isn't exactly written with a lot of subtlety either... that's being generous... but I guess I felt some sympathy with him because we kind of shared the same plight. Him burdened with the inane, screeching voices of ones he wished only to be destroyed. Me hanging out with at least 3 of these companions, including his very same voices. Joined in shared torment. Really brings me back, to the good old days. Anyways. By the end of the game, I relieve him of his burden; he's finally free, and I actually kinda care. He smiles as his face fills with tears of joy. The most natural feeling in the world at that point is to hug him before he leaves! But then he just... disappears, waving me off as if that scene had all the impact of taking a dump. Wow, thanks man. Way to punctuate the end of that struggle. Yeah bro, just let's wave at each other. 'No homo, bro!' Come on! I actually managed to care a little about this guy, and that's what I get for it. Which is this game in a nutshell. You actually start to kind of care a little bit... then it inelegantly drops you on your ass. And this applies to every aspect of it.
Massive FPS drops in biomes, many crashes revolving around new psychic powers, the new ally system is very poorly implemented and is easily breakable in the UI, many crashes related to the stash, very poor tooltips (or no tooltips at all) for the new features, no in-game indications to how to use the new psi features; you need to look up the hotkeys, to find the menu, in order to even notice that they exist, changes to hotkeys are reset upon game restart, items with incorrect tooltips (such as an armor that states it increases psi generation when actually decreases it), missing model animations, bugs with status effects (madness manages to spawn spawn enemies that can kill you), etc. The poor implementations, and terrible UI aside (though that is a lot to put aside), it also features a very large number of CTD bugs, and a not insignificant number of CTD bugs that also corrupt the save permanently. It feels more like playing an alpha than a finished product.
