Been playing this since the post-Christmas period whenever I get a moment free, and been genrally enjoying it quite a lot. It has a different feel to most other open world games and it seems ages since anything seemed fresh like this in this kind of game.
I do like that even when you get to a high level the enemies remain dangerous. Sure, it's possible to take most machines down in fairly short order with the right approach once you get good weapons and mods, but going in unpreprared, messing up or just getting lazy and not using the right strategy and loadout can still see the death animation coming into play.
I have a few areas of irritation, though.
The verticality is really not well implemented for a game with quite a lot of it. Having to scour the base of mountain ranges or structures for the only possible, arbirarily predetermined, route up, whilst having to ignore numerous reasonable-looking but insurmountable climbs is one of my bugbears in games in general, and this is maybe the worst example of it in a good few years.
It is good that different machines require different approaches to take down, but the need to keep switching weapons to adopt the most efficient strategy can get really tedious when you have seven or eight weapons you would ideally cycle between as the situation demands but only four slots on the weapon wheel. I find myself going into some situations under-optimised because I can't be bothered swapping in the ropecaster or sling or tripcaster or whatever for the umpteenth time. Sure, you can play without doing this, but the game is clearly set up to reward optimising your loadout situationally and yet militates against doing so with an unnecessarily clunky system of weapon management.
It also takes the tack that too many open-world games take by requiring specific materials for crafting QoL improvements and weapons and then gating these behind stingily low drop rates. When you have spent a good couple of hours hunting down and killing some of the rarer creatures or machines and still not had a single part you need drop, that's a cue to tweak the drop-rate. Otherwise it just feels like artificial busywork to bloat the playtime.
Unlike some other people, I've not been that lucky with crashes, either, and have had seven or eight now in my 33 hour playtime to date, mostly when entering or leaving cutscenes. Thankfully not too much progress lost for any of them, but it has been annoying. No glitches or problems otherwise, though, aside from some finnicky climbing/falling physics at times.
I really like the world, the story, the atmosphere, piecing together the lore from various sources, and the combat is often really fun and feels fresh, but I do hope the forthcoming sequel tightens up some elements of the gameplay.
)
