It's quite fun. Bit buggy at the moment (crashes a bit), but the overall impression I have is good.
- Gunplay is good. You can fight higher level enemies than you, and they don't feel bullet spongey unless you go 15+ levels above yourself. They rather (correctly) do it that they do more damage to you, but still die quickly. Upgrading weapons have a very noticeable impact.
- Crafting is quite deep. You get memenic points (called meme points) that you can use in different skill trees that unlock new things to craft. Things like food, different crafting benches, building blocks for your house, electrical stuff and so on. Think of it like the building in Fallout 4 / Fallout 76. Can craft a garage that gives you access to craft different vehicles for faster traveling. You need to gather a lot of materials, but increasing your axe/pickaxe (same item used for both) has a big impact on gathering. IE you go from getting 2 per "hit" on a node without one, then +5-7 for a copper one, then 10-20 per swing with a bronze one.
- You can easily blueprint your house and move it to a different place. When first spawning in, you might need to run a while to find a place to put your area where you can build. I don't think there are any restrictions on where you can put your camp other than 1) World clipping into it (outside bounds on cliffs, ocean), 2) Someone elses claim is inside your zone 3) proximity to a "stronghold" (enemy place). You also have a camp that is separate you can put down as a respawn location. Fast traveling to your house is free, but triggers a 5 minute cooldown on traveling. Fast traveling then cost around 150 to any unlocked teleport. If you are far from a teleport location you can't fast travel to other teleports, so to move from one place to another you might need to fast travel to your house (can be done from anywhere) then fast travel from house to the teleport you want.
- Weapons can be crafted. Lots of different types. There are white, blue, purple and legendary weapons of each type. Each weapon then also has a tier 1 - 5 (or 6) version of the guns. Gun recepies are unlocked by finding blueprints. Some you need multiple blueprints of to combine them. They are hidden in the world as loot or in chests. Same system is for armor (head, mask, legs, boots, chest, gloves). There are also mods you can add to the weapons/armor which give stat boosts.
- Survival mechanics are there in food/thirst/sanity which you fix by cooking and eating food / items. Having hunger/thirst lowers your stats by varying degrees, sanity lowers your HP bar. Some places / events in the world lowers your sanity automatically.
- World events are a thing, you can fast travel to some of them. Some of them you get a notice for. "the X is heading for place Y" and you see a thing moving on the map (never tried them, all been to high level for me at places on the map I don't have access to). Your house / area can also be attacked/raided. There are also items you can find that you need to "clean" in a machine to get some type of material. I didn't know what I was and tossed it into a machine and started a tier 2 event (level 25) where you need to defend the machine for 5 minutes while enemy waves of enemies, including elites, spawn. I had places the machine in the middle of my house, at level 9, with no defences built (you can build tiers of traps, turrets and the likes). They destroyed half my house, items and the machine. They destroyed my water gatherer setup which was outside as well, including all the water that was stored. They can probably destroy your item chests as well. Which would suck (I assume there are ways to prevent that)
- Graphically it's good. They descrive the style as "weird new". They mentioned in a survey that they want a mix of modern with cuthulu like monsters/setting. IE: There is a bus that is turned into a monster that walks on the road and stops at locations at drops off regular monsters. It makes crazy sounds.
- Voice acting is very hit and miss. Your character and "main" characters sound good, but others outright sound like placeholders or there is no voice acting at all. Might be bugs, but sometimes the first part of a dialogue with quest NPCs might be voiceless, then suddenly they start talking. Sound design is overall quite good, from music, guns and monsters.
- Runs well, but I have a 4090 so no idea how it is on lower specs.
- Gamplay loop is to run around getting nescessary crafting materials to get new / upgrade items. You have main quests which is from your journal and different quest hubs with NPCs/vendors. Your crafting is also locked in tiers that require you to kill certain main bosses to get to the next tier. These can be grouped/solo (example first boss is recommended for a group of 2, but I've never grouped up, just solo). There are towns/areas spread over the map which all have a list of things you can do, mainly 1) find X weapon/gear crates which can give new weapons/blueprints 2) kill X number of normal/elite enemies 3) find the "mysterious chest" which can be hidden behind an event/secret.
- You can leave messages on the ground for people to look at. I highly expect the way they do this to change. You can write entire instructions there. Not limited to a word list. You can also add screenshots to messages. So you can find ones that say "Chest is located at this place, to get there look at the screenshots and jump from the spot on the first shot to the next one. Beware of enemy that spawns, it is weak to..."
- They plan to make it free to play with only microtransactions being tied to cosmetics. There is a layered armour gear slot as well and a ton of ways to build/decorate your house and the likes, so certainly enough things to make cosmetics out of.
- PvP will be in the game, but not in beta currently. There are places in the map that appears to be pvp areas, to aquire strongholds/areas that give bonus materials? Not sure how they work.
- It lags a bit, but that is because beta only has western US servers at the moment. I have 130-150 ping.