This is fantastic! My gut instinct was correct, I've played for perhaps 4 hours and loved every single second of it. Some vague thoughts:
I think its a stunning looking game. Devs have nailed the arid, massive, hospitable wasteland. Textures are often rather beautiful, lighting is stunning. Day/night cycle is great. Headlights of the cars cast realtime shadows, as does Max's torch which makes for some glorious scenes as the sun goes down, explosions are some of the best I've seen and the world building and atmosphere is superb; all rusting ships, long dead and lonely lighthouses, long dried seaweed and corral, twisting rock formations, the vast expanses of sand and stones with shimmering heat haze, wind, dust. You can feel the heat. The whole world is gloriously tactile, especially as you bump your car around, tires spinning sending great plumes of dust and sand and rock into the air. Theres a real connection to the environment.
The story has done a great job of hooking me in, Chum is a really interesting character and the car has started to grow its own personality too, which is bizarre really. Getting to choose the bodystyle was a big plus for me, I spent literally 5 minutes agonizing over Die Rolla or Death Rattle. Went with the Rolla in the end and I'm already pretty attached to it, love its massive rustiness, love the messy roar of the V6 (working on the V8 at the moment), love the sense of weight it has, crashing over bumps, smashing into other vehicles etc.
Hand combat is really good. If you've played Batman, its the same thing, but I'm finding it more brutal and a bit more weighty. Some of the moves are pretty bone crunching. Car combat is nicely weighty too and extremely satisfying. Using the harpoon in the Opus is great, ripping drivers from their cars, its all wonderfully physical - pull down a tower with it and the car dances and bucks convincingly until the tower comes crashing down.
Performance on PS4 seems pretty stable so far. A few drops from 30fps (I assume) but nothing worth shouting about. And the pop in; I watched the recent pre-release videos and the pop in was quite atrocious, but either its been fixed with the day one patch or it just looked worse in videos, but honestly, I haven't noticed it once.
Absolutely love it thus far. Can't wait to play more.