The PVE survival gameplay - which is most of the game - is very, very good. It never stops being tense and scary. Worms, sand storms, quick sand, etc… they created an incredibly compelling game world.

It does fall a little flat when you try to focus on missions/quests, because they are geared toward making you explore. If you get ahead of them, you will find yourself repeating things a lot. Even focusing on missions, you’ll repeat certain things a little too often. The story is surprisingly good once it gets going.

The PvP portions of the game are an out-of-control dumpster fire. At around 80h it suddenly goes from being an excellent PvE survival MMO to being “Escape Tarkov: Desert Edition”. The game seems built around this idea of faction conflict, but the PvP is a completely unstructured free-for-all. It’s awful. They’ve said they will make some of the endgame PvE instead of solely PvP, but it doesn’t sound like they plan on actually fixing the PvP at all.

Overall, I recommend it. It doesn’t succeed at everything it tries to do, but it does try. And even if the developers seem a little stubborn (especially with their lazy, half-cooked PvP approach) they are definitely listening to feedback.