It's like a single player Darktide... to a certain extent. You "level up" by buying better augments for yourself and your dog (don't skimp out on that) - and of course by getting better guns. Get some good ranged options - the AI likes to run up and shoot at your close. By level three you should get a long-las, though people don't stand still much, so a regular stub-gun or pistol with good sights and a long barrels will work wonders for you. It's very 40K - you'll be running and gunning through trains loaded with skinned human corpses, there'll be random monsters in the background - its grand.
Played it on a friend's steam account for a couple hours. Its walking sim fetch quest: the game. You get no human interaction. Everything is via radio to a voice in your ear who directs you around, or you find audio-logs. The story its is... ok, I guess - better than Gone Home - but at the same time the ending is a massive let-down IMO. This is a game you really shouldn't be a rush to play. There are RPGs and other games with far more engaging stories wher you really feel that your actions matter.
Remember Mass Effect 3? Great game, right until the end that ruined everything? Same story here. You'll have so much fun playing for hours on end, cleaning up the wasteland and becoming that legendary road warrior, with a car outfitted like a bloody tank, that can ram, blow up or burn anything that gets near it. ...then near the end you get a FORCED RACING SEGMENT that completely throws out everything you've worked with previously, forcing you to adapt to a new playstyle that runs contrary to everything you've done so far, and likely forcing to retry the bloody race against Stank Gum for six million times. On the plus side: Once you finally win that race, you will have been driven to an absolute mad-max-grade cannibal rage, ready to eat the liver of whatever gamedev thought it was a good idea to put a forced racing segment into the end of the game. Summary: Everything other than the end is 8/10, great fun, very Mad Max. The forced racing segment ruins it with extremely janky physics and a contrarian game mechanics. This bit is -1293784/10. It is so sad to see an otherwise really amazing game, utterly ruined by a single really bad forced elemented in it.
So... a "kill space pirates, take their gear, coble your own ship together" style game - great ...oh wait, there's a build point system limiting how much stuff you can cobble together? Really? No free play mode, no way to unlock how large your ship can be? and the 'zombie' part of the game - generic space techno-virus nr 5, which can 'infect' blocks of your ship making them useless? Good grief - sorry - no, this is one to avoid.
