Talent trees are frequently awful, but these straight up undercut the entire imsim experience, and all that's left is a pretty boring action game.

I never once felt like I had to make a hard choice. Very quickly, I'd start saving points till I encountered an obstacle that required a certain skill, I'd buy it, and move on unimpeded. Same with combat. Buy just enough to trivialize whatever enemies I was facing, without ever feeling pressured to avoid combat.

Because it was so easy to dip into all the trees and get the most useful powers, I never actually felt like I was having a distinct experience from other players. I wasn't a Security Officer, or an Engineer, I was just a generic guy. Never had the "next playthrough I wanna make different choices" feeling.

The one saving grace is that exploration is pretty fun. The environments are all interesting and varied, and look great. The game is at its best when a lot of areas all open up at the same time in the mid game. It's easy to ignore how little you're being challenged when you have a zillion little exploration puzzles to crawl over. But all that exploration leaves you with even more resources, putting you even further ahead of the curve as you head into the late game!

And once you hit the late game, when there's no new areas and all you have left to do is endlessly retread mostly empty rooms, the game completely falls apart. The entire final act should have been cut. Especially that post credits scene.