Pretty good as far as survival crafty games go.
TL;DR:
- Netcode: Limiting, tho survivable.
- Progress: Starts to get repetitive later on.
~ Lore: Weak, but servicable.
+ Environment: Mixes it up decently between zones, with some zones more distinct than others.
+ Base building: Very good, tho takes a bit to get used to.
+ Skills: A lot of options, and it's viable to mix things together.
+ Combat: Pretty good, a decent challenge while being responsive (If you're the host at least)
+ Enemies: Decent variety across the game, while reusing enough between neighboring zones to keep it familiar.
+ Exploration: Has hand-crafted paths you can go, but lets you make your own path if you're willing to put in a little extra effort, so it doesn't feel too easy to bypass.
The biggest drawback I encountered was that the netcode is pretty bad, not atrocious, but limiting.
If you're not the host, you'll probably not be playing a build that focuses on well timed blocking or dodging, and it can sometimes lose contact for a few seconds randomly and have you walk off a cliff or kill you in some other way (Maybe once every few hours).
The base building is pretty good, it takes good advantage of the reshapable environment and lets you build with blocks so small it ends up looking smooth. Far better than the typical snapping together prefab systems I'm used to.
I like the way the world is laid out. If you really want to, you can explore late-game areas early on. It usually takes a bit of work to dig through walls or circumvent the terrain, but you can. It makes for an interesting challenge to break into a later game area and trying not to get one-shot by everything, and it's very interesting how the same place takes on a different feeling when you come back and can explore the shroud there instead of having to avoid it.
The different zones have a nice mixture of reusing the same, familiar enemies, adding a few new ones, and tweaking the ratio to have more of the difficult ones as you progress, making for a good balance between familiar attack patterns and risk, and avoiding too much repetition.
The repeating pattern of gather local variant of the same resource in the new zone to unlock the next one does get a bit tedious later on, and sometimes the resources aren't obvious from the name (Took me a while to figure out that "Shroud Ice" came from mushrooms and not from the ice).
The skill tree has a bunch of options and you're encouraged to mix and experiment. I like how even as a two-handed melee fighter, I ended up putting a few points into the rouge and mage trees. It also hits a good balance between weighting your build on armor, food buffs and skill points, making all 3 feel important to getting a good build going.
While the lore is a bit weak, the environments are pretty interesting, with old architecture and surviving factions being based off the biome. (As an example, in the basin with all the water, there is a heavy focus on buildings that utilize the flow of water for machines and farming)
