Just finished the game, clocked in at just over 16 hours. I finished most companion quests and planet quests as well as side quests. I probably could have got another 4-6 hours of content out of it had I not run out of enthusiasm near the end. I played on Hard because Supernova looked like contrived padding more than a challenge.
This was... bad. Not atrocious. Nothing stuck out like a sore thumb, but its mediocrity was confirmed cumulatively throughout the game. There's an uptick in quality after Edgewater but it ultimately is a bland game. For example, when you first start exploring you'll find a room, be it in a container or a building. It's the same type of room they have throughout the galaxy. There's a bit of paper on the desk - I tried reading it but was unable to. No biggy right? Except for almost every fucking room in this game has the exact same desk with the exact same piece of paper you can't read. Then the game reuses the paper asset for a note you receive from a quest. It's small things like this which built up and became very very grating.
Choice and consequence: a facade. First of all, the choices you receive in the game do not feel as significant as they should because of how empty the game is. When I was mulling over what to do with Edgewater / Botanic Plant I went through each of the locations and was struck by how there's just not much there. I was inclined to side with the Deserters because I'm not a pinkerton, but I felt no investment in a town populated by 'Deserter' NPC #2 and 'Deserter' NPC #8. There's just over a handful of NPCs in the town with very limited dialogue options. It's the same in Edgewater. Most of the buildings are locked off / boarded off because of a plague (convenient, something I'll get to later). Anyways, nothing really happens after you side with the Botanic Plant. Edgewater lose their power. You're locked out of a few quests and most of the NPCs just mope around. When I returned to the Botanic Plant - expecting some change - it was literally just the same. The consequences in this game don't impact the game world much - they're material for ending slides and nothing more. My favourite part of the game, where you had the most choice arguably, was in Monarch. Another example: I killed the Board representative on the Groundbreaker. Just went into his office and shot up him and his guards. Nothing happened. No one on the Groundbreaker did anything and it didn't come up when I interacted with Board representatives later on in the game.
Content: lots of breadth with almost no depth. I can't get how fucking empty this game feels. Each location you'll visit will have some convenient excuse for why empty it is. There was a plague. We're embargoed by the Board. Byzantium, supposedly the biggest city in the game, is made up shuttered, quarantined or foreclosed stores. I know the developers spoke of the city being an example of not everything that glitters is gold, but come on. There was nothing to do in the city. Remember what I said about struggling to care about the Deserters because they're all just nameless NPCs? Every single location is like that. Each city is populated by a series of static NPCs with names like "Iconoclast Rioter", "Retiree", "Worker". Amber Heights was particularly jarring. Why is everyone wearing full body suits of armor with names like rioter or revolutionary when they're just sitting round? Since they're all wearing helmets they feel even more lifeless - you don't even have faces for the faction you're meant to fighting for. Weapons are limited, with late-game consisting of just MK 2 or MK 3 versions of the same weapon you saw before.
Companions: hit and miss. Some of them are interesting, some aren't. For example, the companion quest for the Vicar is (loosely) an existential search for meaning which can result in his radical conversion to another way of life or not. The companion quest for Pavarti is helping her out on a date. They AI is dogshit, they died 90% of the time. There's no real interaction between the companions apart from some meaningless banter. Also, one of the companions is a robot. Some people might like it, but I saw it as a bit of a cop-out.
Ethics and politics: the game is advertised / hyped up as a smart satire of capitalism which (thru its C&C) deals with moral quandaries. It does neither of those things. Firstly, the ethics of the game. It feels really undergrad, shallow. The game thinks its clever because it subverts the black and white morality which is so common in RPGs, but it just comes off as cowardly. Oh? You thought there was good and bad? Actually, its all grey. Every seemingly good person will have some major fault, every seemingly bad person actually will have some underlying altruistic motive. It's like, nuanced, man. I'm not saying this approach can't be done - KotOR2 does it very well - but it has to be mature and complex, something the game isn't. Otherwise it comes off as an avoidance of having to deal with issues in a serious manner. This is in part why the game's politics are so awful. The best representation of the game's politics would be Elizabeth Warren. It portrays itself as an anti-capitalist satire but really it's a caricature of its excesses, particularly corporatism. At first its funny but after reading the 7th computer log about how you're not allowed to die on company time you just start to cringe. This is compounded by the avoidance of any meaningful alternative. Remember, since it's all grey sincerely committing to something is a rube's game. The upshot of this is that compromise and slow reform are king. The game portrays the Board as negligent and greedy, but the underlying system isn't at fault. All it needs are smart, reform orientated people to lead it. All revolutionaries or radicals are either pie-in-the-sky idealists or frauds (apart from Zora I guess). For god's sake, the main quest is about saving the other colonist's from the Hope, not because it'll be a good thing, but because they're all smart scientists and engineers who will save us! Hence the comparison to Elizabeth Warren: we need to curb capitalism's excesses but not dismantle it, and by we I mean liberal techoncrats like myself. The whole schtick of the game falls flat.
tl;dr the game is the equivalent of a macaroon - small, saccharine and mostly air. Both in terms of content and vision the game fails to deliver. It's probably worth a play-through if you have time to kill. If I was held at gun-point and told to give a numerical score for the game I'd probably say 65 / 100.
