Not that many hours buttttt...
The game feels unfair. You never really know what you're gonna get on each mission. The number of skulls doesn't really matter, because you can get a really easy level, or an end-game armor/weapon/army waiting for you.
It also feels kinda unfinished => At first you feel like it's a single-player tactical Tarkov (which is great ! ) and you blame your deaths on inexperience.
So you start upgrading, hoarding materials like crazy and slowly getting better etc ...
But there are a lot of times where you just get unlucky and get chained or stun-locked and die.
I mean, I found a way to basically play the game without dying : you go through the whole map in stealth mode, wasting a couple of turns hiding behind walls to scan if the room is clear. Until you find an enemy, then after the engagement you just lock yourself in the same spot for 50 turns, passing each turn and waiting for more enemies to come to you (BECAUSE EVEN WITH A SILENCE THE WHOLE MAP WILL COME LOOKING FOR YOU)
NOT FUN.
You can literally sit there for 10 minutes per floor just skipping turns and watching your calories drop.
And you NEED to do this, because if you don't, you can easily get stun-locked by an arc, laser, blast, or pretty much any end-game weapon, and there's basically nothing you can do about it. You lose your gear, lose your progress, get snowballed from there, and suddenly you're back to square one.
I also read that trading was changed, and from what I understand, for the worse. You don't really have any incentive to trade anymore because you need all those "tradeable goods" (Litteraly the decription) for upgrading your ship. Even freaking gold bars. It just feels dumb.
In any case, I'd say the game is fun for about 10–30 hours. And the achievement stats kinda show it. Most achievements have a completion rate of 3–5%, sometimes even less. There's literally an achievement for dying once, something you'd expect basically every player to have, and only around 20% of players have it.
My two cents: I think most of the positive reviews probably come from pre-release, before achievements were a thing, and a lot of the veteran players have just moved on from the game.
It's a shame because the core idea is really good
