The concept is great, the controls and ui are seemingly intentionally horrid. Most of the time you're controlling VERY slowly rotating cameras, but when you get some freedom with "orb-mode", it gets bad. The orb has very delayed controls and narrow fov, which at least made me get completely lost and turned around in a single hallway. It gets worse as each "bonk" with a wall distorts the screen and nudges the orb to random direections. Controlling the darn thing is a trial. Flying outside the station trying to find "clamp controls" is a needle & haystack situation. Most of the puzzles are fairly straightforward, but instructions can occasionally be deliberately vague. Most computer systems you interact are designed by misanthropes, these UIs are not meant for humans. No technical issues, apart from the narrow fov at times. Lots of flashing lights, though. Overall I did like it. Bit confusing at times.
I'm slowly making my way through the DLC area, few main quests & several side jobs/gigs in. My thoughts of the DLC & game in no particular order. Playing a sneaky hacker with silenced pistols * The DLC intro walk & fights were quite long and fairly challenging (at least for my build), but the difficulty in the area proper has relaxed quite a bit. * The DLC intro fights were quite railroaded and "cinematic" more than the usual * Quite a few bossfights. They're tanky. The tanky-mc-tankface doubly so. * The DLC area is pretty "fallout -ish", more delapitated and grimy than rest of the NC. Feels like a completely different city, which I guess it technically is. * Missions and story have felt cool so far. Technical side: no game breaking bugs so far, but some visual glitches, like characters suddenly losing skin color & turning glossy bright white, has happened 2-3 times. Performance: R9 3900x, rtx3090, 32GB ram, RT=psycho, otherwise mix of high/ultra settings. is more or less the same as in the basegame, apart from more crowded areas where it dips to ~43 fps for me. While not desireable, it's still friendly zone. Otherwise it seems to mostly hold 60 (capped) in action areas, which is essential to me. All in all, I'm enjoying my time in the DLC.
The gameplay, visuals and audio are all good in my books. The story is... there? "Go out and do stuff now that you're almost a grownup, then come back to do adult stuff" - Essentially the whole game is kinda about a post-apocalyptic tribe sending you on a "rumspringa" of sorts. However... I'd consider my pc fairly high-end (3900x, 32 GB, rtx3090, ssd), which is why I find it really baffling how hard this game stutters. Stutters are most noticeable while driving the bike, during which even audio struggles to play. Considering how much driving back and forth there is in this game, I can't fathom why this hasn't been fixed already, considering the game has been out for more than a year at the time of writing. The game also defaulted to 30fps lock, which in 202X I find absolutely baffling. This might be because the characters are *mostly* animated at that framerate, so their movement is bit janky, and even more janky if you raise the fps cap (the setting is under "details", not "display", in case you can't find it). Found few quests which I couldn't continue on until I saved, exited to menu, and continued again. What made this more annoying was that the unskippable introvideos play every time you exit to main menu. And there's no "exit game" when in-game, no, you need to exit via main menu. They really wanted the player to know which companies made/published the game. It might sound like I found more negatives than positives in this game, but I did play it to completion (didn't bother completing all of the collectathon thingies) and I'd say I enjoyed my time in it. Took me bit shy of 10 hours at a chill pace. Now, as for a rating? If fixed, easily 4 stars. But at current state I kinda want to give it a 3-.
