I have mixed feelings about this game. You have the foundation of an interesting game, but the loss of identity that comes with the direction it took.
This game is celebrating its 2 year anniversary and I just couldn't place what it was that was bothering me so much as a newer player. But I have come to my answer:
Loss of Identity & MTX over function
So the game you expect to see is this interesting creepy horror-themed shooter. What you don't expect to see is how...anime everything gets. It abandons groundedness very quickly in favor of pretty colors and goofy little guys. One second, your shooting weird TV head monstrosities and zombies. The next, your collecting your stuffed beaver toy that is alive and gets wood for you. Which sounds fine, til you realize the art style goes from 'reality' to 'cartoony' very jarringly. If the lil' guys you collect could be found roaming around in the polluted abandoned factories that are covered in black ooze, blood, gore, and etc you would see: A gnome sized Ginger Bread guy cleaning up with their licorice broom or a 7 foot stuffed dinosaur plushy cooking a steak in the local dilapitated cafe.
TL'DR: Everything is gritty and nightmarish til you find your first metal boy or plump mushroom man in a completely different art style.
My second issue is, well, turns out this game is also an extremely predatory gacha game. Now obviously with hindsight, this is a NetEase title. So don't think I need to expand too much on what that ends up bringing to the table. The map of this game looks enormous, til you realize that almost every single asset in the game is copy pasta. This game is extremely empty, and sure its one thing at launch, but were talking two years down the road and they've got some wild overlooked bugs and lack of map features. Every mob has either one skin or a maximum of 4, every location has a building in it you can find in every other location, the game feels jank as hell with some weird clipping or half-assed clamber system. It draws you in with the tutorial, and the first Monolith area, after that however it devolves into copy paste with larger health pools. Now, I can see someone saying 'Well maybe they don't make that much money' and I would retaliate with 'They have an anniversary perk (until the 2 week event ends) right now where if you spend over $700 USD you can get a special frame for your profile picture.' and one stop at the official Reddit quickly tells you there ABSOLUTELY are people spending that. There is absolutely no way to earn in game currency for the big ticket cosmetics, and there is also no way to get the big ticket items without the game currency. Oh, and to go back to having lost their visual identity, absolutely nothing in the shop looks like it belongs in the world that is advertised.
TL'DR: This is a NetEase Gacha game that does not respect you, which to be fair is a redundant statement anyways.
So...yea. Big bummer, was willing to try it out for the first person mode. I got my fun out of it, but I reached a point where I just couldn't justify wasting my time on it anymore. Maybe if the story was remotely interesting I could have been retained as a player, but the story is so generic I can't really be bothered. If you've ever heard of, watched, read, or listened to an Anime/Manga that has a 'dark theme', well you've already got the story for this game too.
