Recommend with significant caveats.
Pros:
- Aesthetics. Water and weather and light look fantastic. Crafting, assembling, salvaging, repairing, and combat are more satisfying thanks to visual and sound effects. Little details of weapon handling add a lot of depth.
- Exploration. Setting sail for mysterious icons on the map is always great. Limited opportunity to also just spot things through your spyglass and investigate is just fantastic. Hopefully more will be made of this in the future.
- Building - Process of building basic systems to get resources is reasonably fun. Hoping more expansions / customization for the boat will be forthcoming.
Cons:
- UI. A lot of common sense is missing here. Routine actions are slower and more annoying than they need to be. There's no excuse for moving items between containers requiring more than one click. The in-world controls (boat dashboard, elevator buttons, etc) look great, but you cannot reliably hit what you're looking at. Some displays (e.g. how long a food thing will take, profession on Lazarus rack screen) just show false values.
- Stability. Some things you build or place behave until you leave the area and then vanish, teleport or stop working upon your return. Newer features seem untested. After building the jet ski item and mooring it to the ship, all other built items on the ship detached and floated in space. The FENRIR thing is totally useless as there is no way to control it and it dies instantly in the water. The game occasionally freezes my entire system and forces a hard shut down. Been a long time since I've seen that.
- Writing. Truly awful. There's a large corpus of journal entries and it's mostly unreadable; fake profundity more concerned with the cadence of words than making any sense. A lot of it frankly looks AI-generated. Very heavy on sentiment and very light on events, characters, anything else. The voice in your head is the same way. Don't look for a plot and don't read or listen to anything if you can help it.
