There is so much to love in this game, with its mind-bending setting, deep storytelling, some of the most unique 'enemies' and technologies ever, and solid casting and acting.
Unfortunately, the gameplay is equally amongst the most boring ever. The main character being a courier sounds special at first, but you quickly discover that it's just an excuse for the worst of modern, 'open-world' gameplay: a gazillion pointless item collecting quests. Pick this up and return it, now pick that up and return it, and on and on and on.
Most disappointing are four aspects of the game that reinforce how boring the collection routine is:
1) The more you collect in one run, the wonkier the controls get and/or the slower the character moves. And if you fall, all those items get damaged. Feels unique, and realistic, at first. But after the 100th trip it's just annoying, and there a thousands of trips more still to go.
2) The very 'enemies' that make the game so unique are impossible or very difficult to defeat, depending on the stage of the game, causing you to either: (a) spend 30min inch by inch edging forward, in sneak mode, holding your breath while also monitoring your stamina, to avoid an enemy you can only occasionally see; or (b) risk dying and losing everything you're carrying while fighting them, or damaging everything even if you win.
3) If you like the idea of stealth and sneaking, too bad, because there's also a feature built into the game that increasingly damages everything you're carrying the longer you are outside. So sneaking around the enemies damages your goods as much or even more than fighting them.
4) As you build up your character you unlock tonnes of unique tools, vehicles, weapons, and more. Many of them seem to counteract points 1-3 above, greatly improving the gameplay. Yet, in many cases, there are features in the game that make those tools frustrating or annoying to use anyway. The main aspect being vehicles, which can allow you to carry up to 5 times or more than you normally can. Yet both terrain and vehicle physics are designed to make most it almost impossible to use them in most places.
A final aspect that's disappointing, but not quite so frustrating, is that you can build a certain thing (no spoilers about what) that seems like it will greatly improve your travels. But to do so, you need *hundreds of thousands* of resources that are generally found in batches of 500-1000. So it takes *ages and ages* of additional repetitive gameplay. And once you finish, you discover that by that point you've already completed everything that it would have helped you with anyway. Would've been better to ignore it!
So, for me, 10/10 for story and setting, and I'm playing right to the end for that. But 4/10 or less for gameplay. (nb. Probably a 7/10 each for music and graphics).
