I would like to recommend this game. I really would. There's some elements this game gets right. The story is interesting enough. The setting works, even if it's hardly unique. There's even a few nice touches, like being able to customize your music in the medbays. But at the end of the day, this game absolutely fails at understanding what makes the game it's trying to be so good.

The core problem is damage mitigation. In Dark Souls, what this game is obviously patterned off of, you have ways of avoiding damage. Blocking works, even if you're low stamina. And dodging has invincibility frames, so that you can go through attacks. You can even cancel animations to dodge, to avoid the trouble. That right there, the ability to to counter damage, is why Dark Souls is a good game. This game, however, doesn't do that. You can block, yes, but if your endurance isn't high enough, you'll be knocked back and take full damage. You can dodge, do a degree, but there's no invincibility frames so enemies with a large attack can still catch you with it. And you can't cancel out of animations to dodge, so if you have a slower weapon, or one that likes to get multiple strikes in before it's done, you're going to be stuck in that animation. If your opponent doesn't stagger, you WILL take damage.

You can counter some of that with how many options for healing this game has. But then you're locked into a play style that focuses on being able to heal more. There's not a lot of room for variety. And variety is one of the real selling points of Dark Souls. This game doesn't have much in the way of variety. There's only a handful of enemy types, that can be broken into two main groups. Humans in rigs, and robots. The robots are where any real variety is, since they can be different designs. And they require you to react differently depending, if you can figure them out. Humans, on the other hand, mostly all behave the same way. You wait for their attack, then charge in and hit them enough to keep them staggered, or until you run out of endurance. Rinse, repeat, until you can execute them. You can obtain schematics for their armor, as well as components to craft them, by attacking armored body parts, or you can attack unarmored body parts for extra damage. I do like that system, ultimately. It makes farming for parts more stable, and means you can choose between greater ease or greater rewards. Note though, you only ever get melee weapons in the game. Sure, you can take weapons off of enemies by removing their arms - armored or not - but only the melee weapons. Anything with a ranged attack will not drop for you.

The bosses are, in my opinion, another weak point in this game. But that's mostly due to the lack of damage mitigation. Dodging is unreliable, for reasons stated above. And bosses do too much damage to be able to tank them. So the game slows considerably as you try to find openings to attack. Unfortunately, a lot of the bosses have moves that, even if you've increased your health (I'll get to that), can kill you in a single shot or volley that stuns you. It becomes an exercise in frustration as you have almost no room for error in most boss encounters.

As for increasing your health, or managing your healing, or almost anything involving stat upgrades, they are done via implants. Your rig has a limited number of slots available, though you can upgrade rigs through the game. You then need energy, which is what your levels give you. Other than this, your stats do not increase. Your health is tied to health implants, your endurance is tied to endurance implants. Your healing, any other special effects, all tied to implants. This is where the variety in the game can come from, but it is severely limiting, especially early on.

Weapons have another problem. There's a series of classes of weapons available. However, you get experience per weapon type the more you use them. This means that whatever weapon type you choose early, you're effectively stuck with for the rest of the game. You cannot choose to swap to a new type and have any effectiveness to them. Yet another thing limiting variety. There's also different sets of equipment, each with their own effect, but you need to have the entire set for that bonus to come into effect. Head, body, two arms, two legs. Which take resources to build, and upgrade. Those are at least easy to switch out, and is where most of the variety comes from. You'll want to choose your implants and play style based on your rig of choice, or have a few ideas for different rigs if you need different conditions - though be warned that you can't really save setups so have to change them manually each time.

The game is frustrating, even cheap. There's good ideas here, but the game feels like it wasn't quite finished. It needed a bit more work to polish off the combat, to give that variety, to really let the players have control. If you're aware of that, and still want to play, then there is a good game buried under all the frustration. It'll just take a lot of work to extract that diamond from the rough.