izigame.me

Cleanup feels like an attempt to staple more content onto Heavenly Bodies in a format modified to get by on a much tighter development budget. Instead of navigating a series of wildly different and unique levels and setpieces, you are confined to a single, small, bland space station that starts off in rather a state of disrepair, which you must get back into working order, a few tasks per day, with the use of some new tools that you get to play around with -- which are fun for about 5 minutes each until the grueling, finicky, chorelike nature of using them to drag around and manipulate other physics objects sets in. Said tools are mandatory for most tasks although you won't always know which ones will be required in advance, and despite the ability to clip them to your suit or PMU, they are extremely easy to get lost and softlock yourself.
Even leaving aside everything taking place on the one station, part of what makes the DLC feel so stale so fast is overreliance on the new PMU. It's like if you took the pod from the asteroid mission in the base game, stripped away everything fun about it except for the thrusters, and made the majority of your activities dependant on using it, which will almost always involve trying to weave your arms through the tangled mass of tools and bungees clipped to it and your suit and pray you successfully grab the 1 of 3 overlapping interact points you're trying to. Then, when you're tasked with doing activities further away from the station, the only place you can check a map to actually verify the location of objects you're supposed to be traveling to, is back on a terminal in the middle of the station. So if you lose track of your objective, go back to the station, finagle the airlocks, crawl back down the central corridor, doublecheck the map, then go all the way back and try again. THEN when you finally get to your destination, discover that you're SOL because you lost the magnet somewhere (and there's no way to check where), requiring you to start all over again.
Making matters even more complicated, objects and tools remain scattered where you left them between days... unless you restart the game and pick Continue, which puts everything neatly back in place. The PMU has a hands-free operation mode which makes dealing with most things, such as the metal debris, about ten times easier... which is never explained to you except via a tooltip that only shows up on day 5, after dealing with all that godforsaken debris on day 2. You have much less instruction to go by for most of your objectives, which can lead to a lot of trial and error, wasted time, and frustration. And as of halfway through day 5 (out of 7), the entire DLC has been a series of boring, frustrating, tedious busywork tasks that feel more akin to a banal sequel to Getting Over It than anything to do with Heavenly Bodies, while I keep wondering when the hell anything fun or interesting is going to happen.
The base game I would recommend in a heartbeat, at least on sale, or if you have someone to co-op with. I really can't think of a single reason to recommend Cleanup.