I'm pretty impressed with their use of voxels and procedural systems, but it raises a lot of questions about how they're actually executing things and how much game there will be, vs. just flying around and occasionally blowing things up.
While that can be fun, it needs structure, and it's not something that should get designed as an afterthought. A game with combat needs that combat to be inherently good and carefully designed, and it's more important to get the "active" parts of a game perfect than the way the scenery's built. What little we saw of combat suggested a fairly clunky experience that was an afterthought, rather than something that's been carefully thought out.
If they're are trying for a seamless experience that's all algorithmically driven, it's quite difficult to have a lot of persistence, simply because of memory issues.
For example, you blow up the mountain that the Evil Aliens were hiding their fortress in with a nuke.
Great, it's awesome to use voxel terrains to give players the power to destroy things. But then you visit a nearby planet, and the game doesn't have the memory to store all those voxel states, and when you return, the mountain's back, along with the fortress, since these things were all generated with the voxel system and the algorithm says, "build mountain fortress here".
The Evil Aliens might be gone, if their states can be stored in a really cheap way, but the illusion is broken. Counting on players not to notice this stuff because they're never going to return is a bad sign; it says there isn't enough game that we're ever going to care about the locations we visit, or that we're supposed to just keep on keeping on, never really getting interested or attached to things. That kind of takes away from the "exploration" aspects a lot; if I literally don't end up caring about the places that are being generated procedurally, because they're all just kind of a blur after a while... there had better be one heck of a good game design hiding under there.
In short, thus far it's feeling like a brilliant tech-demo but not like a game I'd play for more than a half-hour. But it's obviously very early in development and based on their previous title, it's quite likely that they've just shown it so early that it's too early to judge.
