Like 65 hours in and around 55% completion, finally heading west to the coast.
...and I think I need to take a break and play other stuff and come back to this months later to finish it off. I'm starting to go from loving the game with mild annoyances to hating the game and being constantly pissed off. I'm just tired off these super aggressive enemy packs always jumping on my face and I don't have time to ever aim and everything does like 50-70% damage per hit on me with purple gear. That upgrading these purple/orange weapons/gear are a huge grind. That the autosave isn't great and I keep dying and losing progress.
I'm not even sure what the point of concentration mode is anymore since the big enemies move so fucking fast that even in slo-mo mode trying to aim and hit some little piece target while the enemy keeps moving is damn near impossible. Spent like 10 mins trying to hit a purgewater canister on the back of a grounded Stormbird and missed every goddamn shot in concentration mode because I couldn't aim quick enough.
The game just seems hard and frustrating and not fun right now.
And that the game keeps crashing more and more. I'm getting worried it's gonna break my PS5. I feel like I get at least one hard crash per day or two now. Today I got a bug after leaving the arena where all the sound effects disappeared in the game until I closed it and restarted. Had the game freeze twice on the map screen hitting the map button to return to gameplay and it just gets stuck on the map screen and I have to hard close it and start over. This is easily the most buggy game I've played in years and the most buggy Sony 1st party game ever released imo.
You nailed it on all fronts. The more I play of this the less I like it. Pretty much every change Guerrilla made to the formula from the first game has been for the worse. Like, what is the point of slowmo when the new machines now spaz around uncontrollably 100% of the time? The burrowers and the monkeys are just the fucking worst. If they wanted to up the difficulty, just ditch slowmo and have us rely on our actual aiming ability, but have the machines move in a way that is at least semi-trackable. With the slowmo + spazout setup they have now, you just sit there for 15 seconds desperately trying to line up your shot, only to see some dickhead or his projectile slowly fly in out of the corner of the screen to stick you in a stunlock loop for the next 30 seconds.
All the extra damage types? Totally pointless if we have extra slots in the wheel, all it means is that I need to spend way more time micromanaging my inventory so that I have them all covered. The fucking tools and puzzling, where to begin, I thought game devs figured out 20 years ago that crate pushing puzzles are a fucking waste of time and you should probably just cut them if that's the best you can come up with. There are so many of them, and they're made all the more shit by the fact that the pulling thing is fucking miserable to use - first you just hunt around every corner for the visually indistiguishable PULL THIS hook in the room. Then you're either too close and get a big STAND BACK TO USE THE PULLCASTER message, or you're not, but because the thing has no reach whatsoever you have to do it three or four more times to pull whatever you want wherever you want it. Copy paste x 100, there's the entirety of your puzzle design (and a ton of main story mission design) in this game.
Some of the underwater stuff is just shocking. The main quest section of it was boring but playable, but I had an underwater side mission last night (collecting parts for the supply contracts) that was literally the most nonfunctional thing I've seen in a AAA game in the past decade or so. You have to go find 4 crates in some underwater ruins - okay, fine, I'm swimming around spamming the ping button looking for them while 4 crocs I can't fight try to eat me, great fun. The thing is that the crates are in the actual buildings, which you can only swim into from a couple of cracks. Once you do, you get the amazing 25 degree FOV the game uses when you walk around in vents, the camera goes absolutely nuts, and you and stop being able to see anything at all. You then try to make your way out, no longer able to tell which way is up and which way is down, while fighting with the PS2 era swimming controls, as you clip through the geometry. You try this for 2 or 3 cracks per building, each time nearly needing to restart the game because of how thoroughly stuck in the geometry you get from clipping so much. The solution? Well actually, dumbass, there was one little crack, not highlighted by your focus and visually indistinct from all the other cracks, where, if you line it up juuuuust right, you would have gotten a triangle prompt to swim in and get one of the four things you need. Duh! It's nuts. Like they 100% knew that this was not finished or functional, but they said fuck it and left that quest in anyway. So many things in this game (the fucking climbing) feel like that.
