I've been having fun with this, not that far yet cause I spent 2 days rerolling for fire lady(only took 49 accounts... and only after they gave 10pulls to every account), but I'm liking it a lot more than I did Wuwa when I played that. Usually not too much into open world but the zones are somewhat compact enough and I like the building stuff around. Also been dabbling into production lines and it's quite fun. I also like some of the side systems like running deliveries and buying stocks and reselling them on friends' ships for big profit.
Story is pretty bad(or well I guess it's the bare minimum), combat is decently fun although if I wasn't playing Laevatein I think it'd be more boring? She has a built in ressource management mechanic that makes her interesting, a lot of other chars looked pretty meh in comparison. Wish skill generation was a bit higher baseline, but I guess this way they can sell a SP regen char.
Gacha is... kinda bad. On average it looks somewhat similar to Hoyo, but considering they're doing that I don't know why they went with a more complicated system that also makes users feel bad when unlucky(more than usual), between people who hope they can reach a 50/50 right before they hit their 120 else it's wasted and the fact that if you don't single pull the entire time, you're "losing" pulls for the 120 guarantee, it's all kinds of dumb. Weapon pulls also look fucking shit, again same average as hoyo most likely, but just worse for no reason. Only good side is getting a free weap every patch from the battlepass(an inferior one though, but well it's better than nothing). Hopefully they adjust some things, it's really weirdly designed.
Also first impression for casuals is likely horrible since the majority of the pulls is tied to exploration and advancing other systems like that, which takes hours to get to. You do get some free standard pulls but these kinda don't mean much, especially with the time limit on the banner. Easy for someone like me who plays a lot to reach 120 before the banner ends, but for a heavy casual it's unlikely and once they notice their 30pulls they put in the banner don't count for the next 120 limit(cause they didn't read), they'll likely just quit.