So I beat this game over the course of the last week or two since my posts here. My total playtime ended up being 19.7 hours, minus around 2h for my first playthrough which I quit. So around 17.5. I did all side content in the game I could find which is probably 95% of it, maybe I missed a quest or two
First my choices were Jonas -> stanton(sp?) -> protectorate -> monks and I took the monk endgame where I didn't land right away but that shit seemed half baked. My choices were mainly influences by convenience and music.
The pit was by far the best part of the game. There were even times in chapter 1 where I dare say I was enjoying myself. Jonas/Braxton conflict was interesting enough, I made nice with mercy and got her to join Jonas. Good amount of side quests most not that interesting but whatever. Mission control and Armoury were ok side areas. Hydroponics sucked(all of them), more on red and yellow later but green has some of the worst art direction I have ever seen in any game.
Factory was whatever, short area not much personality. The habitat was garbage. This is where the game really falls apart, in the end it felt like a worse version of canyon of titan from wasteland 2. Minimal side quests most were pointless, the factions all had little personality. The faction quest lines also literally consisted of like 2 quests, and usually an optional side quest in the area. Whole habitat literally took me like 90 minutes.
Fucking mat and luke luke from fallout(generic traders in front of the hub) had more characterization then the entire Habitat. I could ask them about the hub, about caravans, about caravan drivers. I could get info on the world from them. These interactions are basically completely absent in colony ship. Occasionally there is an important npc who will give some pillars of eternity level exposition for no reason but there's no real conversations in the game. There is no Beth to ask about rumors.
Maintenance tunnels bla bla nothing interesting. Hydropinics yellow and red absolutely sucked, but I will get to the combat later. After that the end game literally takes like 30 minutes so there's nothing to really talk about. I bypassed 2 fights with speech options but that was it for the entire monk endgame.
Edit- I completely forgot the heart, that area sucked too. Literally had like 2 side quests and 3 people to talk to who weren't merchants.
So the general problems this game has;
First the world itself is an interesting idea. The characters themselves all suck ass. Very few distinct personalities, everyone is either a dickhead or the monks who are autistic without much personality. This is a huge problem for the game IMO. The fans will disagree but I was not motivated by any characters in this game. Wheras I liked Killian, I liked Gorsky, I liked sheriff green who didn't even have a face. I liked Gilbert Bates. Diego was a bro. I wanted to kill Seravok and Irenicus, I wanted to kill Walton Simons and Dedriana. A single tear rolled down my cheek when I was forced to kill Tchort.
As I write this aside from Jonas and Ava. I literally need to google the names of the habitat faction leaders and I just played the game. They are generic flat B line B tier movie boring.
The actual idea for the colony ship is a fine idea, not that it hasn't been done before. I feel the game engine is too restrictive to realize the potential. Compare colony ship to running around Underrail sewers, or even running around system shock 1's space station. Or even levels in Marathon a 1994 FPS, Zero comparison. It's way too restrictive small and claustrophobic.
Whoever decided to put those little pipes or whatever for interactions interrupting movement fuck you. I know it was VD so fuck you double. Seriously fucking annoying to not be able to run through areas because of half closed doors. I'm sure some autists will defend this but this is poor poor poor design.
The CYOA stuff isn't as bad as AOD but it's still there, especially in the end game. I won't go on like a broken record but suffice to say it felt like everything after the pit/factory is super rushed.
The powerleveling with skills is absolutely fucking retarded. It was retarded in elder scrolls games, it's retarded here. Let me choose what skills I want to upgrade.
Example this is just before I leave for the factory. I needed 1 more fucking lockpick to be able to open 2 level 6 lockers. One ended up having an energy sniper rifle that would have helped me in chapter 2. Retarded design. In the end I wasted probably 30 minutes of my life running around chapter 1 trying to find some container I missed.
Some of the skills were annoying to use(stealth) or felt half baked(steal) but nothing to really bitch about. I ended up just maxing almost everything on my main character except computers and stealth which Faythe handled. Kind of defeats the purpose of choosing your tags for companions but whatever lol.
Absolute trash tier itemization. There are games I like that have poor itemization. That being said there's too many types of pointless fucking guns and armour. Every time I still need to check if it's an upgrade or not. 1 less max damage, 1 less ap. 1 dr more in projectices 1 less in melee. Ect it's fucking pointless you don't need 100 guns in the game just copy fallout retards. How many smg's are in fallout? 2? Yeah ja2 has 20 types of smg's but it's really simple, damage, range, ammo type. In CS there's only 4 types of ammo, with a few exceptions most are restricted to 1 type of gun (.45 can be pistols of rifles, maybe some others). Literally like 40 different types of body armour. Again this is pointless busywork to sort through. I'm sure some people here liked it and that's ok but there just isn't enough difference in equipment to be worth having this many variations.
The game is completely linear in a bad way. A question for
Vault Dweller. If having to wait for chapter 3 or 4 in Baldur's gate 1 to visit the bandit camp/cloakwood was so egregious. Why do I need to wait until chapter 3 to visit the heart? Or chapter 2 to visit the Habitat? After years of shitting on the BG games you made two games much more linear then them. Good work lol.
The COMBAT absolutely sucks ass. By far the worst part of the game. Despite being squad/party based there is minimal room for any type of tactics or thought. Throw grenade, kill 1 enemy at a time. Deal with autistic shields that regen and make fights take longer. Every fight in the game starts in a pre planned tiny arena so you don't even have the tactical breadth of fallout 1/2 where you can start fights based on location. Ie slavers in the den are hard, fight them in a bottle neck and thin them out.
More importantly the enemies you fight in CS are awful. Absolutely awful. Human enemies which to be fair are probably 70% of encounters. Robots and critters are pure cancer and do nothing but throw status effects on you cutting your AP. With shields you're fairly tanky so the only effect this has is making everything take longer. Compare to Underrail, where generally speaking getting stunlocked means getting dead. The difference is Underrail almost always lets you start fights on your own terms. So you are always given a fair opportunity to avoid debilitating status effects.
In CS, lets say it's you against 2 floaters 3 mind worms. Main character moves first, maybe I can disable 1 floater, but the other one will nuke my party regardless. This doesn't make the fight unwinnable it just makes it take 5x longer because now everyone has half ap for like 4-6 turns or some shit. Too many enemies are annoying to fight.
I had a similar issue in dungeon rats where every time I ran into an enemy with a grenade it meant a game over. I had to re load and use a grenade to make sure I 1 shot him on the first turn or before he went. DR has better encounter design overall then CS though.
Almost every good game lets you start fights on your own initiative. CS sure as fuck isn't xcom.
I may have forgot something but end rant. Overall I'm glad I beat it but I did not care for it. Definitely one of the worse rpg's from the 2012 era onward. I put it above numenera at least. This game is definitely worse then wasteland 2/3 or the shadowrun games however. It took me 17 minutes to write all of this so please don't judge me I put a lot of hard work into this wall of text, thanks in advance for the down votes.