Perhaps the best representative of games with procedural generation.
In the game you can dig, or you can not dig. You can rob the Korovans (literally), or you can not rob them. You can feed the entire settlement with rice, or you can feed the corpses of defeated opponents. The freedom of choice is almost intoxicating.
Even after hundreds of hours, I still find something new to do in the game. Each new settlement is unique and will never be similar to the previous ones. The plot, as a class, is absent here, there is a main task for “passing” - to get to the ship, wait for it to charge, day after day fighting off waves of opponents and get off the planet. This is truly a generator of unique stories. And given the wide modding community, and hundreds (if not thousands) of useful mods, you will never be bored.
But everything can’t be so smooth!
There are also disadvantages, objective and not so much:
Entry threshold - There are a hell of a lot of mechanics in the game, from obvious to counterintuitive. And the tutorial in the game is, to put it mildly, extremely superficial. Therefore, you need to mentally prepare for frequent losses or downloads in the early stages of getting to know the game. Even on the simplest difficulty you can destroy a settlement.
Filling the world - Without DLC and mods, the game does not shine with a variety of buildings, things, factions and tools. Mods, of course, change the picture a lot, but I wouldn’t recommend that beginners dive into it without understanding the base game.
Optimization - Basically, the game is not super demanding on hardware and will run quite easily on a 15-year-old machine. BUT, there is a nuance! If the settlement grows and more than a dozen pawns (including animals) are running around your map, then drawdowns may begin. Unfortunately, the game is almost incapable of multi-threading, and a farm of hundreds of chickens may well bring the FPS to the plinth. And if you smear yourself with mods, you can immediately give up high FPS and third speed, and initial game loads of 5 minutes are the norm (no, an SSD will not save you).
Well, some minor quibbles:
The graphics in the game are stylish, but I would like the textures to be clearer in places (this can be solved with mods).
The music is very pleasant, but the other sounds are not very diverse (this can be solved with mods).
In general, almost everything in the game is solved with mods, even performance can be increased a little.
Well, the final boss of the shortcomings (IMHO, of course) is the PRICE!
Steam, March 2024, in rubles and dollars:
Base game - 1100 ($35)
Royalty - 750 ($20)
Ideology - 750 ($20)
Biotech - 900 ($25)
An anomaly - still in the announcement, but probably also 900
3500 ($100) excluding discounts (which are rare and no more than 20%) are a little bit stronger, in my opinion.