The combat is just not fun. The amount of information you get about attacks and defenses, the clarity of those mechanics, the options you have to customize feedback and combat, you name it. It's all a considerable downgrade from Pillars of Eternity. The writing always gets praised but I found it edgy more than anything. It's still Obsidian somewhere there, so you still get some good stuff but it's overall a disappointment.
The good: The protagonist of this game is one of the best written characters I've ever seen. She's full of personality, and while still selfless and kind, her heroic traits never flatten her or make her less compelling to follow. Her story maps perfectly into the themes of the world and both come to very satisfying conclusions by the end. The game is full of hunter-gatherer-inspired mechanics that make the world feel distinctly neolithic at the same time as apocalyptic. The animal-shaped machines all help maintain that combined atmosphere and the many hunting tools at your disposal invite you to plan and prepare ahead. The bad: Unfortunately all those excellent mechanics are either completely neglected or abused to the point of exhaustion. Time and time again the game shows the developer did not trust the playerbase. They did not trust the players to sit with a sparsely populated valley, because every two feet there are machines that will overlap with other machines so that you're always fighting a swarm. They also did not trust the player to be enjoy cracking a challenge with guile and cleverness because every other mission ends with a cutscene in which the protagonist stands in the middle of a field to be surprised by an army of machines and/or humans. So much for preparation. And finally they did not trust the player enough to handle scarcity, but also to be normal about crafting and looting. So you end up with a gigantic inventory full of crap that's way more than a human could carry, but somehow not enough to make what you need to survive in the wild. Every battle you churn through more material than someone would find in a lifetime. The economy of the game collapses in the first act. I can't help but lament how the dumb genre requirements (huge map, infinite enemies, tons of crafting and lots of action combat) prevented the world to feel as alive and real as the story and the invididual mechanics promised.
This game and Pillars 1 are the most rewarding CRPGs I've played. They're both fairly different in gameplay and story, and they're both excellent in different ways.
It's all covered in the title, honestly.
