I wrote up a long-winded thing about how the game is disappointing me, but no one will want to read that.
However, another user on a different site summed it up well for me in general. The conversation was originally about the early Quarry mission, and a player attempted it but was under-leveled without knowing it.
"In my experience, the game hits you with areas like this constantly. It is an extremely annoying theme, especially since there are very few moves that are good for consistently striking multiple enemies early on. Moreover, it isn't like there is a truly interesting set of gimmicks to areas like these. As soon as you instigate a battle, it becomes endless waves until you reduce the percentage to zero, so you are shoe-horned into a specific style (no point in sneaking around). Considering that Pearl Desert is trying to sell this game on exploration and gameplay, it is frequently jarring how pathetically limited you are in your gameplay choices ultimately in a lot of situations. Sneaking is impractical, flight is short-lived to a ridiculous degree (to make the puzzles work), the control scheme is clunky, and the quests are mostly standard-issue fetch quests, hunt quests, and kill quests. The longer I play the game, the more cheated I feel, because the game does none of these things as well as a half dozen other games in the genre do."
