About 15 hours in and I'm kinda starting to feel the boredom that some others have posted about setting in. I think the game could've done with some balancing and also some condensing actually. The game is pretty damn big, way bigger than I expected actually. And while this is certainly pleasant in some ways, it kinda feels like it's maybe a bit too big for its own good? Part of it is probably due to how slow the actual looting runs tend to be. At least the areas which have a lot of zombies in them, there's a lot of zigzagging, a lot of sneaking up on them and taking them down one by one. The game engine is kinda slow in itself so it starts to get repetitive after a while, especially once you hit bigger locations. Also, while I haven't had that many bugs, I've run into some crashes now as I've gotten longer into the game and it's fucking annoying to lose half-an-hour of straight up zombie-whacking to a crash (like what just happened to me). That said, apart from the crashes, something like Wasteland 2 was waaaay buggier for me overall. Like... no contest.
Like I said, the size and layout of the game also feels like it's been hard to balance. So it feels like gathering resources is pretty easy. The big challenge is if you go up against humans, which is completely fine in my book. But the all the other stuff feels too easy.
The game is really addictive though. The loot -> upgrade -> character interactions cycle works to draw me in.
The most fun, and what I'm mostly looking forward to, are the little events that happen at the start of each day. The little character interactions feel good and are generally well-written and quite "human". I'm sad that I've only seen on crisis event so far during this long-ass time I've played, a real wasted opportunity. I don't know if more show up if you screw up parts of the base management, or if people die more, but given that the game feels pretty easy that would be kinda backwards. It could also do with more reactivity. Again, part of me wonders if it wouldn't have been better to focus on a smaller number of survivors and shrink the game-world and focus more on the depth of character interaction. But I dunno, maybe that'd would've been predictable. Like I said, it's kinda its own allure to have so many locations. Again, way bigger than I expected.
Visually, it's not great. Character models look very simple and boring (pretty good animations though) That said, I'm very pleased with how good some of the locations look still. They're pretty fun to go through in my opinion and I feel they did a damn good job of squeezing out quality from the engine. Audio-wise, it's nothing spectacular. Alright music which is fitting, but nothing to write home about. You'll recognize some sound effects from AoD.
I'd already say that I've easily gotten my money's worth (I backed the kickstarter for the lowest entry, though I'd feel it was worth it if I had bought it at the current price) and am looking forward to playing more. I think it's a damn shame that the drama now overshadows the game because it' a game that's definitely worth a chance and does some things really well. I guess 2014 have spoiled the Codex for good games. I'm sad to see how something like WL2 and DS gets huge amounts of attention but this gets looked over.
I hope there will be more patches though add some stability to the engine though and maybe balance passes as well.