Started it recently. Currently indifferent towards a lot of it, feels like a lot of triple A games where it's really pretty, and a lot of it is passable, but nothing is particularly good. I want to like Aloy, but the script is often clunky feeling, and I'm not exactly sold on the set up.
Which would be whatever, if I was more engaged by the gameplay. I got the lure ability n stealth kill fairly early, so a lot of the early going has been cake walk city (and I'm playing on very hard, which I'm guessing is a health bump+me not having aim assist) with the watchers, striders, and scrappers. It's almost laughable how well that mechanic works right now.
And even if I got away from stealth it's not like the melee combat has much in the way of depth, or the enemies had any interesting patterns at first. Luckily I think the game is really about to kick in high gear, as the corrupter and sawtooth at the least kept me honest, if not actively challenging enemies.
That said outside of one feedback loop issue, I do like how the game controls. Aloy feels nice n breezy to move around, melee hits against robots feel nice n loud, and it seems I'm going to get a variety of interesting traps/bombs to mess around with between my trapper thing n sling.
I don't quite like the animations when you get hit, feels like it's lacking something unless one of the bigger robots is really hitting you. Like Aloy herself doesn't really sell it all that well, so there is this weird disconnect feeling when you get hit, that I don't get n tighter action games. And really think fighting humans is gonna be extra boring if that first sequence with them is any indication of how they battle, seems fairly dull AI wise too given this company had neat stuff with the Killzone 2 AI.
On the plus side, outside of the stretch ...pre-montage lol, I been let loose to play. As soon as I got my first story quest, I just went off n did stuff. Explored, hunted things, did side stuff, did errands, bought all the weapons from a shop because I had killed everything and picked up everything like I have OCD.
It's certainly pretty.
No Hud Gang 4 Life.