[playtime inaccurate, offline-only player nowadays]
If you get the full game on 90% off you may have some mindless fun, but otherwise I wouldn't recommend it. It has some interesting ideas, and I certainly think 40k is the perfect theme for a unique ARPG, but it doesn't come together and the execution is just not where it needs to be. I'd also caution anyone that thinks (from the misleading trailers, etc) that this is a twinstick shooter... it's not. Every action (even basic shooting) is a cooldown-based skill that you have to be in range of your targeted enemy to use. You won't be running and gunning, or even really aiming for that matter.
The biggest issues (and there are countless others) in no particular order:
- Devs never came through with adding the seasonal content to offline mode (and never will since they've moved on), so everything related to that is inaccessible to offline players and will disappear into the aether once their servers inevitably go offline.
- Performance is very weird when it's not outright bad (and it is indeed very, very bad). Outside of constant huge framerate drops the oddest issue is that particles/effects will frequently freeze/stop appearing (but everything else will be fine), then suddenly "catch up" on fast-forward like you're on a bad connection when playing a 90s MMO... except I play completely offline so there's no reason for that kind of behavior and of my 1000s of games this is the only one to ever do something like that.
- Voice audio is atrocious. Awful acting, terrible compression (most lines sound like they've peaked the hell out of the mics), and super inconsistent volume levels that mean you go from wincing to not hearing a single thing being said.
- Story might be neat but the details are impossible to know because even when you're able to actually hear the audio the game CONSTANTLY interrupts itself. Even if you stand totally still any time dialogue starts (which would be miserable given how frequent it is) you'll still get interruptions that skip the rest of the conversation. Nobody bothered to pace or account for the triggers so just when you start getting interested it will get skipped over. Also the in-engine "cutscenes" are MST3K-tier awful.
- The Inquisitor aspect is wasted potential and ultimately just set-dressing. You won't be actually investigating anything (the choice/morality system is a tacked-on joke) or do anything remotely similar to what transpires in stuff like the Inquisitor Eisenhorn/etc. series of 40k novels, which as a side note are great and highly recommended, especially as a 40k-fiction starting point.
- Builds are very, very boring. Skill trees are 99% uninteresting fluff and if you're trying anything specific then you've probably gotten all the even remotely relevant skills (if you can even call them that) before level 25. There are only a handful of different item types that have the same abilities attached every time, so after you've played for an hour you've seen pretty much everything on offer. Super late game has a handful of slightly more interesting gear options, but still nothing that makes up for the mountains of garbage you'll encounter.
- The difficulty is odd. Despite all the tools to customize your experience the game is only ever painfully easy or you're getting one-shotted. There is no middle ground and the speed at which your character progresses up to level ~50 is reminiscent of MMO private servers where the XP rate is quintupled. >50 and it's a brick wall. There's no satisfaction, no curve, no balance.
- Bosses, what bosses? Anything that would be considered a boss will be completely forgettable and burned down before they finish their first impossible-to-hear quip because balance, as I mentioned, doesn't exist. While that speed of killing is kind of the goal of ARPG power creep, a fresh character's initial interactions with one should always feel like an actual struggle. But nope, not here. The only thing that even indicates you're in one are the (terrible) copy+pasted in-engine cutscenes that probably interrupted the rest of the story-building conversations. Otherwise it's just another inconsequential moment in a sea of them.
- Maps are instanced, boring, kitbashed repetitions of one another. Nothing about how missions work will feel like going on an adventure or exploring a world/ship and instead is just "pick a mission from a list, teleport in to a small glorified arena, finish it and teleport out in a few minutes, repeat". I expected the randomly generated missions to be like that, but it applies to ALL of them, main campaign included. The individual decor looks decently 40k-esque, but it all blends together into a repetitive blob with no standout set pieces or environmental progression.
- While I appreciate being able to play with a controller (decades of mouse-based ARPGs have ruined my hands) the targeting system is truly awful and will almost always target the wrong thing with no way to adjust, and/or switch at the last second or shoot in the wrong direction for no reason. There's also some fundamental issues with figuring out what your skills do early on because there isn't a tooltip mode for controllers, and you can't hotswap to a mouse mid-game. And finally, the thumbstick deadzone (which you can't adjust) is set way too high, meaning you have to always have it at the max distance to run... which feels bad and accelerates drift.
- Everything about the "vehicle" levels is abysmal. How they got beyond even the earliest prototype phases I'll never know. Absolutely horrible, painfully slow, simultaneously boring and frustrating. Do yourself a favor and drop the difficulty to the lowest and speedrun the objectives on those missions because wow... what a joke. And if you're playing with a controller? Ooofph, good luck, because you will *never* be targeting anything even remotely close to what you need to and you'll have even less ability to adjust it than normal. Hope you like pointlessly shooting at out-of-range and off-screen mines instead of the army of enemies directly in front of you.
There are tons more problems, but in closing I'll just mention that basically all of these were issues at release back in 2018 and, after almost a decade, are all still present to this very day. None of the crucial problems were ever addressed in a meaningful way and instead more half-baked systems were piled on top while milking everyone with DLC after DLC.
