I get home from a Dr appt, eager to load up the demo and XBOX Live has decided to stop working, so we switched over and played on PS5. My verdict after playing through the prologue and the first mission in Rift town? I don't know what I expected but the whole game has a kind of ugly/mean aesthetic to it. You could tell from the art but it just felt like dirty post-apocalyptic Anthem without the suits. For character creation, the faces all sucked, no blondes apparently make it off-world.
The story so far seems meh; I wouldn't trust these people to make a sandwich much less settle a world. Without much study, it seems, folks just land and start breathing the air and chopping down trees, like it was Australia. "Look, black goop!" "Seems bad, note that down." "Check!" FFS. The rest of the narrative seems ripped straight from Anthem, except I am sure there are parts that I haven't gotten to that make it come together for at least some coherence. Maybe. At least Anthem didn't feel like mainlining despair in a WW1 trench, or Bartertown at best. The classes, too, seem almost 1:1 mapped over from Anthem. Devastator/Colossus, Pyromancer/Storm, Trickster/Interceptor, Technomancer/Ranger. The heals being generated from kills to help push the action is a nifty idea, though.
It doesn't quite make as much sense on a planet where "people are eating their children" and the human population was only 500,000 to begin with and they couldn't reportedly grow food due to the Anomaly, not spoilers, all stuff you find out in the first 20 min. Basically, you are trapped in the first valley where humanity landed and every person you kill, including all the bodies regularly strewn about the landscape, are pushing humanity towards extinction. Awesome. Destiny had the Last City but you weren't killing humans like dirty vermin constantly. The Demo starts with "we killed Earth". Then you slaughter 50ish of the surviving humans across two different firefights. Huzzah!
Skill trees won't get filled in for the demo, major nodes are missing, IIRC. Item drops haven't been great but only on world 2 (which is basically dynamic difficulty setting, can only be manually set once unlocked) ATM, not that many missions in.
Will keep playing at least one character through the end and hopefully I will be eating these words, in total love with the game, overlooking the setup and they have some world building that makes sense by the time the Demo is done that makes sense, or I missed something ( there is a time jump in the prologue that might explain why lives are so cheap, even with this probably being humanities last chance.) etc. Or at least I don't pay money for this garbage. Thanks SQUEENIX for the Demo, and my learning this time from the Avengers.
Will say this in its favor: Gunplay wasn't bad and we had a pretty cool moment. I got way over-extended on a rescue mission you do early on, and ran right up to a monster closet. A ton of stuff runs out, and I am playing a Devastator, armor/skin up whatever that skill is called. My buddy playing a Trickster drops a Time Slow dome on me, and we shotgun the whole crowd to death stranding around me, like 12 or so mobs. It was memorable that I walked out of that not just alive but full health. So the game play might be great.
Cut scenes regularly so far in the demo lost lip sync/timing on PS5. Will play more but will not be pre-ordering.