TLDR: The game might end up being good at some point, maybe its OK if you play it on "Hero" mode. But the dev's approach to game design is to spit in the players face and so I recommend you do not reward any game dev that disrespects players like this with your purchase.

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The game comes with two difficulty modes. The first is "Hero" mode which the dev, in-game, characterises as being so trivially easy that it's almost a story-only mode, which would dissuade most average gamers from even trying it. Story-modes are great for people who want them, but most people don't. So most people aren't going to choose that. The other difficulty mode is described as a "Default/normal difficulty" mode, which most average gamers are going to think is the right choice.

However, the "normal" difficulty mode is actually so unfair that the game ceases to be an RPG where you can build and play your character how you want and as long as you have good strategies and focused synergies, you'll win. Instead it becomes a puzzle game which strictly limits player choice and expression. Every encounter has requirements so strict that you need to build your characters in very specific ways, have very specific equipment, and take very specific actions in the fight to get out unscathed. The primary gameplay becomes resetting over and over until you figure out which combination of things constitutes the key to unlock "success" in the fight. No real strategy, just solve the 20 step puzzle. You are as free to make choices in this game as you are free to choose to not wear clothes in a -20 °C blizzard.

The developer constantly tells people in the forum that "the enemies follow the same "rules" as the player, so you've just got to get good at the game". It's probably true that the enemies follow the same rules, but the stats and equipment the enemies have are very clearly far beyond what your characters have, and you're very often significantly outnumbered or in a poor tactical position.

There is also NO indicator on which quest lines might be easier or harder, and in fact quests that seem like they should be easy (like taking out the first bandits you ever meet in the game) are often far harder than many quests which seem like they should be much harder. Enemies also have no level indicator and there is no way to examine them or inspect their gear to gauge their strength, so you have no idea if the fight is supposed to be done later, or if it's just the usual 20 resets to get a run where the RNG goes good on your perfectly maximised strategy for you to win.

Every combat encounter has enemies designed specifically for combat. You never fight someone who might not be a fully invested combat guy. There is no realism in this world, just puzzle fight after puzzle fight where one wrong move, or a mistake in choosing a feat at level 2 5 hours ago, spells instant failure. There are no punks or drugged out losers, or bandits who are only a couple years into their career. You only fight super soldiers in varying amounts.

My 100% combat units with the best equipment I can possibly use and all the extra HP and DR feats gets 1 round killed by the enemies who seem to have 100% reaction chance (meaning they get free attacks against you whenever you do ANYTHING) and always hit even when blinded by a grenade and my guy is hiding behind cover.

On the other hand, social tests basically cannot be failed if you have even have a single character with a specialisation in a single social skill. There is no balance here. Combat is so strict it's a puzzle, but social options are free wins and stealth is virtually free too if you're allowed to use it. Unfortunately most encounters do not support stealth, so you're probably better off building full combat, since you'll rarely use it in the only part of the game that is difficult. In fact stealth is more often used to get a couple token items here are there from sneaking into people's rooms, than it is usable in combat.

The social options for overcoming hurdles are numerous, which seems great! More choice, right? But this is a trap, because they're so easy to succeed and it often results in avoiding combat (which you may want to do because the combat sucks or because you're playing a character who wants to minimise killing, y'know, ROLEPLAYING) which ends up meaning your characters are starved of combat EXP which you need to level up combat skills specifically. You can't just get quest EXP and level up and have that be enough, it' is nowhere near enough.

There is also no way to grind EXP or money and shops have limited stock anyway, so grenades and gadgets which are often basically required to pass certain fights are in extremely short supply. In fact even healing is in short supply! You can literally end up stuck on 1 HP on all your characters (though I luckily never had that happen, it is possible!).

All of this means that it's quite easy to get to get completely stuck and literally soft lock yourself with no way of being able to progress the game. It's not unlikely that you will be forced into a fight you cannot win because you used up all your best grenades or took a feat that was useful for a current fight but not the next one, or if you're off by one on your skills and therefore cannot collect extremely useful items that are required to solve the combat puzzle that is the "default" difficulty mode.

I've played many games with symmetric battle mechanics between NPCs and PCs. Very few of them are this poorly paced and balanced. It's an extremely common design pattern, and usually very satisfying as it typically means the enemies aren't bullet sponges and your choice of tactics matters. But the enemies in this game are still somehow bullet sponges, even with the best gear available and maxed out combat feats and skills in an area. The PCs unfortunately, are not. Maybe that's symmetric but the enemies are very clearly loaded out the wazoo with full combat stats and insane DR gear to make it as hard as possible to succeed.

I had one fight against the first bandits you meet, with a maxed out team for that region (I couldn't beat them until I did every other quest) and I stealth murdered 2 out of 4 of them in stealth and then started the fight, and they still almost killed half of my team by just having 100% hit chance against everyone, 100% reaction chance, and doing >50% damage on even my tanks on every single melee attack, which they can do 5 times a round. Very cool. I eventually beat them after a few retrys but I used up some of my most expensive grenades and still had a character get a K.O. feat.

But here is where things get really bad for this game:
Given everything I've just said above, the worst part is that the game does not let you change the difficulty mode at all. Even after 7 hours of playing and grinding through the fights and finishing every single quest and looting everything you can loot. When you get soft locked on a fight because you did not have the prescience to know what the next fight would entail and therefore didn't know what might needed ahead of time, and now you don't have the consumables to solve the puzzle. Well, "♥♥♥♥ you" if you want to play on the baby hero mode just so you can see the rest of the game. You need to throw your 7 hrs of progress in the bin and start again. This is just the dev spitting on the players, and the disdain this developer has for players comes across extremely loud in many aspects of the design of the game.

There are lots of games that aren't for me, that is totally okay, and I don't usually give those games a negative review. But when I come away from a game feeling like the dev despises the players and only cares to celebrate their own "genius" at game design, that's when I get pissed off and cannot help but put up a review like this.

Interesting if you are looking for a fresh world to explore, but UEx, balancing and progression is clunky to say the least.

On the good side
* The world is interesting, fresh, and treated in a clever adult way.
* Combat is tactical and challenging
* World persistency : when you deal with an encounter it's gone and there's no artificial respawn...although, it tends to make the world static without a lot of surprises.

Now on the "less good" side
* UEx is clunky and I ended up many time doing things I didn't want to do because of that. (i.e. Stealth phase)
* The progression is so tight that you pretty much have to see everything to earn enough skill points and gear to succeed. I often found myself struggling to figure out what I missed/could do to reach the expected skill check level.
* The whole thing is done like a metroid vania where you need to remember where you saw this lvl 6 Pick Lock check you couldn't do earlier...that you now should be able to succeed...but...there's no map...no way to track all those places.
* Difficulty is all other the place with pretty much no feedback on the next encounter difficulty
* The world is desperatly static and waiting for your next move.

I was torn between giving it a thumbs up or a thumbs down because there are things it does well and things it does poorly, in the end I decided to go for a thumbs down mainly because of its price tag, if it had been about half the price I'd have been more forgiving.

The game is very frustrating because whilst it appears to be fairly open it very much has an "intended" order to do things and if you stray from it you'll get suckerpunched by the difficulty until you reload and try a different area. The skill system also looks very promising at first but it only ends up encouraging metagaming, with skills increasing by being used and there being a limited amount of checks to use them every fight you talk yourself out of is missed combat experience and every skill check you don't pick in conversations is lost forever. This all adds up to a game where you're trying to outwit the mechanics rather than immerse yourself in the story and setting. I'm sure there's an audience for a game like that, but it's not for me.