Sci-fi shooter Earth: Revival tries to do everything, to its peril

polygon.com:

The year is 2112. Following first contact with a hostile alien force, Earth has been left ravaged. You, one of apparently (but not really) few survivors, are tasked with becoming a crackshot sci-fi super-soldier who specializes in all things shootybangs. As you level up, the number beside your name increases, although not in adherence to any rhyme or reason. Once it looks high enough, you enter a dungeon with three of your friends to complete basic fetch quests before challenging a monster who is noticeably larger than the monsters surrounding it to a war of attrition. This is Earth: Revival.

It is also every video game.

Earth: Revival is the debut game from Nuverse, a new studio formed by veterans from the Chinese games industry. While you may not immediately recognize its parent company, ByteDance, you will likely be well-acquainted with one of its other subsidiaries: TikTok.

Naturally, this means a lot of money is being invested in Earth: Revival, which is reflected in what amounts to quite a lofty ambition. It’s a third-person, open-world shooter that combines typical raid design with resource gathering, crafting, base-building, and a host of survival mechanics, meaning that it incorporates a little bit of… well, everything, really. And to an extent, this is impressive. Somehow, it manages to be relatively stylish when considered alongside its countless counterparts, and the shooter design is surprisingly tight for a game that is still around a year out from launch.

And yet the one detail that sticks with me throughout my demo is that the only thing making Earth: Revival different right now is its desire to be everything at once, which ultimately runs the risk of it being OK at lots of things without being good, let