After nine hours of playing, I was completely convinced that the game design here is a failure and should have been addressed completely differently. Fetch-and-go quests form the core of the gameplay, and building the entire game around them is a grave design flaw. The "adventure shooter" genre here feels like an attempt to hide the inability to tie cutscenes and gameplay mechanics together. In fact, the cutscenes and the game itself exist in two different universes. The ideal solution would have been to turn this into a full-fledged interactive movie with RPG elements and bosses. This would have allowed for more detailed locations and a more appropriate enemy balance. For a classic RPG, there's too little depth, and for a shooter, the quests are too exhausting. In their current form, the studio has simply squandered enormous potential.

The open world in the game doesn't work and is simply annoying. You won't explore it because every location is littered with fifty Wovans, and you'll simply run out of ammo. If they'd made the game more intimate, like The Last of Us, players would have 100% scoured every room. Inside the complexes, exploration is engaging, and the enemy-per-room balance is well-balanced. But once you step outside, the balance collapses. Endless enemy spawns force you to skip exploration, and the weapons and resources you can find in closed areas are woefully inadequate. This open world is simply unbalanced.

A separate question concerns the visuals and lore. I understand the concept of Soviet retrofuturism, but it could have been developed with more respect for logic, so as not to create such a wild dissonance. A floating island next to 1950s control panels looks ridiculous. If you have access to technology like neuropolymers! Look at "Romashka" and "Pchela." The bee repairs a freaking daisy with a laser from its stinger, likely carrying polymers within itself that restore it from scratch. If you have such technology, is it really convenient to use archaic remote controls? The robots could have been made more rational and functional while still maintaining their unique aesthetic. Engineering logic and style aren't mutually exclusive, but here style completely overwhelmed common sense, turning the technology into a caricature.

What's particularly infuriating is that they made "Snake" a mandatory story mission, not just an Easter egg. It's fucking crap. The game has flexible settings for people with disabilities: object highlighting, automatic puzzle solving. So the developers intended for accessibility for a certain audience. But no one took into account that these same people might be physically or mentally unable to handle "Snake." I can't stand this genre, and the thought of being forced to play a poorly implemented "Snake" on top of that makes me sick. If you're making a game accessible, follow through with this idea and provide the option to skip or simplify these mini-games.