This is a big, beautifully made Japanese fork. It's not the most fluid around, but it's still smooth enough to hold traction in sketchy sections, with the weight of the fork adding noticeable authority to the front end.
There were no problems with the 200mm stroke when we dropped the big stuff either. Rebound and compression are externally adjustable using separate damping chambers in each leg, so tweaking one won't wreck the other.
The upside down design gives a hell of a lot of fork, with massive CNC'd uppers swallowing equally huge 39mm lower sliders. Freeride strength certainly shouldn't be an issue and steering stiffness is reasonable too. It is monster heavy though, and lock is limited so you're going to have to be going very big, very fast, down some very large hills to make it a viable race fork.
Build quality is superb - the damping adjusters click round on top of a ball bearing sat on a spring, giving a nice soft but positive clunk between each setting, and the construction is totally CNC machined. Feedback so far gives us no durability doubts either.
