I'm barely past the "Walking Sim" part that ends with a short train ride at the beginning and I'm already super impressed. Spent like 2 hours looking around, exploring and getting a bit into the Lore.
You begin on a terrace overlooking City 17 and the Citadel, there's ships flying around, Striders moving along in the background, flying rats (pigeons) are standing on ledges to the left of you and they'll fly away if you try to interact. People are talking and moving around below, you can bend over the hand rail and look down to see what's going on down below:
You already have the first few interactive elements around you, to your right is an old-school radio where you can pull out the antenna and use the control to change the channels, the first one is some sort of weird numbers station, there's also another that plays classical music and a third with some talking, there's some books you can pick up and look at etc. too, a bucket with a few rotten apples and just a shitload of detailed stuff lying around you can interact with like matchbooks, cola cans, bottles etc.:
Right behind the terrace inside is the window you can write shit on that was in one of the videos on the previous pages along with some holophone thing you talk with Eli on:
You will barely get around admiring the attention to detail they put into at least the first level, the texture work and almost everything is really crisp and at times eerily realistic, the parquet flooring, wodden walls and all the dirt look absolutely real when you walk around:
At times you kind of wish for even more interaction than there already is, some objects are static, others you can pick up and play around with but for instance can't open or similar, but obviously there's a limit to budget and what makes sense.
There are some scripted scenes where for instance a Strider walks up a wall right in front of you and damages the environment:
Lots of shit to interact with and lore to find if you look around, for instance there's a globe in the apartment that basically indicates that the good old US of A is no more and you are or there is something of interest in Russia:
There's also some drawn sketches about the Citadel being built and downstairs on a bench you can find a paper you can pick up with one or both hands and read about the recent events:
Lots of shit with Cyrillic writing around:
Some of the environment looks absolutely unreal in how real they managed to make it look:
Combine taking care of law and order:
Lots of the landscape and objects look vaguely Eastern-European, you could move this antenna or parts of it around or do things like open car doors and look around:
This is the first thing you see upon descending from the train when Level 2 starts and after you've got a gun:
Some things I didn't like was the "Jump & Run" and how some section transitions work, jumping over large gaps seems to also hark back to teleport, some section transitions like crawling through a small hole is you standing near it and pressing a button till a UI element loads up and you appear on the other side, while you have to run forward and press the right stick down to hop on something. Also Alyx's voice is a bit annoying so far.