Tried it for an hour or two on game pass thanks to a 14-day trial thing for 1 euro. Anyway, this will not be in-depth, but just very early impressions.
I think it starts out good, with a bit of mystery and such, the initial impression feels fine, overall. I had some light fun exploring the tutorial island, finding keys and what not. The game also runs well, but as everything modern now, it looks incredibly blurry, and “liquidity”. If that is a thing. Any type of fast movement smears the models out on the screen.
Then I had my first combat, and was surprised that the critters hit hard, but it also seems the difficulty setting buffs the creatures with additional HP. So, the combat feels a lot like slashing at things without any real impact, just like in Skyrim. To finally whittle them down to zero after a while. Felt very unfun, especially when it comes to the heavier stuff, like the tutorial boss. He has a lot of HP, so you will have to make 2000 attacks for him to die. He was not hard to dodge, but I noticed, the game has one of the worst sins when it comes to melee combat. The sliding-into-place effect (ELEX also has this, for example). This guy, when doing attacks, ice-skated into my character for the animation to connect. It looks and feels awful, and it makes position awkward, as one second he could be at the other side of the arena, and the next right next up to my face. I don't know how common this thing will be, but not a good first impression. Otherwise, the controls for combat, and movement felt fine. However, the key for holstering the weapons constantly bugged out, forcing me to run around like a retard with my weapons at the ready when exploring.
After that, I reached the first city. Felt way too early for a big city, especially after seeing several characters with an exclamation mark over their head, making me feel exhausted immediately. I don't want to spend 3 hours talking to people already. The city also gave me this feeling of MMO. Not good. What I noticed here also, was some heavy stuttering performance wise. The game had no problem running tutorial island, but here... damn. Like 2 different games. I dipped out at this point, feeling no interest in continuing playing. The dialogue from here also seems to shift into this quirky, sarcastic Marvel tier of writing. I just can't stand that type of writing.
