I'm actually planning to put together a video review, so I'm in the process of organizing my thoughts. This thread is just a spur of the moment thing.
Overall I really liked it. It was well worth the $15 sale price I got it for. The game drops you onto a planet colonized by humans in the future which has undergone some event called "The Bleeding". Now there's sentient meat creatures expanding everywhere, with people eating meat off of them to survive. There are mutated human thralls to the meat. Vomiting and putting the vomit into your inventory to use later is a game mechanic. You as the player have some kind of infection at the start, which kicks off the story and you go out into the wastes and get into fights. It's David Cronenberg's Kenshi, more or less.
It's an RPG, but choices are pretty streamlined. There also aren't alternate ways than combat to complete many quests. It's a little disappointing for the dialog based skills to get so little use. Combat is real time, I'd call it hard hitting twinstick style combat. Even end game a good three or so hits could kill my character from mid or high level enemies. There is a stealth mechanic, which works though often it acts just as a way to get close and deal some sneak damage rather than being able to sneak entirely past obstacles.
There is melee and ranged combat, with a few flavors of stat specialization, but even if you only specialize in ranged or melee damage with your character you'll almost certainly want to fight with both kinds of weapons. Ranged combat boils down to a lot of circle strafing and baiting enemies around corners. Melee combat relies on getting a few hits in before doing a dodge roll away from the enemy's attack.
There is overworld travel in the style of an OG Fallout game. The player can go through the desert divided into two areas, chokepointed by a specific location full of enemies, but once that is cleared out, can freely go back and forth.
There's relatively new content, The Perished City, which is a city so large it has its own overworld travel.
The game is Early Access and has been that way on Steam since 2021. Lots of the negative reviews are by people unhappy with the pace of updates. Many of those reviews were calling it dead or abandoned right before the big Perished City update dropped. Personally while I obviously want to see the game get fully completed, what's there right now was worth the price of entry. If you do buy this, I think it's best to buy for what's there now instead of what may come, given the small (I believe two person) team and history of slow updates.
I could have sworn Discovery was connected with Bad Robot, but it looks like I was wrong.
It still has a "JJ Abrams sensibility" - frantic space combat, overly emotional characters, a lot of flashy but meaningless tech (the hologram communicators as an easy example) and visuals (the way the bridge was often shot). It was very much trying to be loud and new, while throwing in a lot of surface level references to try and give it some franchise credibility (this USS Discovery is a rejected Phase 2 concept design).
It all came together in a loud, unlikable soup that felt inauthentic to the franchise. There was some course correction later on, but too little, too late. Strange New Worlds went the right direction, while the Section 31 movie tripled down on all the worst aspects of Discovery.
I don't want the Trek movie to have the DND movie tone either, but more like when that movie was made they understood the correct tone to match the franchise. It felt authentic to what DND players experience. If the Trek movie has the same care in figuring out what long time fans want, it will be good.