Prime Junta is right, the game's not SJW its just written with a whole host of vapid commiefornian lefty assumptions. Some people think these are the same thing and while they do share a good amount of stuff, SJW has some extra crap and obnoxiousness added in, i.e there is a difference between being some vanilla commiefornian zombie and being a complete nutball in Portland. Kinda sad because the premise itself is fairly decent but the execution is really braindead.
Its a really weird mish mash of stuff that just doesn't ring true to pretty much anyone except commiefornian zombies. Whether you're an actual commie like Prime Junta or awesome like me the premises they use don't really add up. This is a problem because humor needs to ring true, so the main selling point of the setting is seriously hurt by this. They try to evoke something like the old Company Store Mining towns but then make everyone litterally sound like they are (fake commiefornian) communists. They don't really tackle the idea that corporation are essentially a fiction and can only exist when something enforces shares etc. Unlike the Shadowrun setting, they make no real effort to show the relationship between governments and corporations. They just sorta kinda assume they are governments, well then what happens when company shares get traded? Do they get traded? Who regulates these trades and enforces ownership of the share? Is it the corporations themselves? Because if so it would inevitiably become corrupt and just become feudalism/1700s-era mercantilism. Which oddly they sort of almost touch on, but it appears to be more of an accident. For the most part none of this is explored because fake commie commiefornians are too vapid to even consider such things cuz muh corporations are eevul. Sadly even real commies do consider these things, i.e. they have an entire theory (which is wrong but it exists) around the consequences of these systems. They clearly just grabbed modern corporations from a commiefornian Googler type perspective where the corporation itself pretends to be socialistic in a strange manipulative veneer while also sort of believing it and slapped that on top of an idea from the turn of the century circa 1900 like the old-time trusts worked that way.
All in all its an ok game, the gunplay is decent. The story is meh, its not dumb its just worthless and the characters (mostly) kinda suck. Parvatti is the best example of this, they made her asexual because of muh representation. This is an obviously bad decision because the reason people don't write asexual characters is not bigotry, its because they are boring. Sexual interaction is one of the key things that interest humans. If you write a character purposely lacking in interesting qualities, well you suck at writing. The game is semi-linear (i.e some zones are hard locked out) but offers a lot of ways to do things and you can do stuff like skip straight to Monarch and sneak past everything if want. For the most part its pretty clear that during the design of all the various quests real thought and work was put into considering the various possibilities both mechanically and temporally (i.e. was something related already done). The RPG elements are OK but half baked, its mostly the perks that are the issues. The selection of perks is fairly flavorless (you just grab 5 in a tier and move to next teir) and there really aren't that many good ones. This makes the flaw system mostly pointless since you simply don't need extra perk points. All in all the perks can do some interesting things and the skills system is fairly good in that you really can't just get all skills so there are some interesting choices to make. But its just not quite there.
In the end its kinda like a pop-tart. It kinda tastes good but its also kinda like eating cardboard, but is obviously not real food.
Obsidian wtf.
