I'm enjoying it well enough but it really isn't Yattaf-friendly (that's what you were asking, right?)
Combat is basically old-school Fallout except you can command your whole team. Actually maybe X-Com would be a better comparison, in that case. Honestly not that far from Shadowrun Returns either (if you stripped the magic out). So deliberately simplistic down and dirty shootin' and stabbin'. It's reasonably well-balanced on normal, enemies will fuck you up if you make stupid tactical decisions, so don't do that. I run from every world map encounter, though, and reload when I fail to run. The fixed battles are fine, but I really don't want to fight every random schmoe in Arizona. Dungeons are always unexpectedly huge, so there's a genuine sense of tension early on when you don't entirely know what the game wants from you and it seems like you could realistically run yourself out of resources and permafail. I'm not sure if that's good or bad, but it does gel with the setting and there is unspoken emphasis that you need to build a diverse and balanced team. (By this point though I can afford to just leave the Uzi on burst fire and turn everything before me into a red paste.)
The writing is adequate. There's some nice flavor text but really little outstanding material (though I have to say it's a distinct step up from what I was previously playing). Oh, I wanted to mention, during chargen there's a religion and brand of cigarettes dropdown for each character? And these have reflected None for every follower I've recruited, which I can't help but think is strange. It might be suggestive of the caliber of NPCs you're working with, they'll make casual comments as you walk around new places but there's no personal Q&A after recruitment and they don't have personal quests or any of that stuff. Aside from Angela, who you get handed to you overleveled in the intro and who has genuine plot importance, none of them so far have had any plot significance at all (setting significance is there, though). And your core team's lines come entirely from interrogating NPCs with questions that basically all boil down to "'Metal Gear?'" so they're not contributing a ton either. There are persuasion options in conversation but they crop up rather less often than I'd expected.
Personality was clearly always meant to come from the world, so your mileage may vary with interest in the subgenre. The game has a very odd sense of humor. Oh, I wished earlier to submit this piece of wisdom: "Don't hurt hobos and hobos won't hurt you." That's sound advice Super.
The score is restrained to the point of nonexistence. I'm not convinced there are more than two background tracks in the game. Maybe there will be more now that I've transitioned to the second half?
So mostly it's a series of "Yeah, that's good enough" boxes checked off in something that plays well to my thematic biases. If nothing else, I continue to be amazed at the number and variety of ways in which my attempts to bring law and civilization back to the post-nuclear desert continue to trainwreck.
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Grefter: 4-1 is a fair deal shorter than the other first round areas (the other X-1s are all quite lengthy with shortcuts, 4-1 just makes you worry about even attempting the place because skellingtons). 4-2, however, more than makes up for this deficiency without even the decency to include a shortcut. I might genuinely have quit the game if I'd died in there.
EDIT: you know, I actually don't know this, why do people kill themselves deliberately in Demon's Souls anyway? (Apart from black world tendency shit, that is.)
