I must confess that I don't understand at all the complaints about the combat, and I would go so far as to say that the combat is not only my favorite combat in a game in a long time, but top-tier combat in general as far as games go.
I learned, after about ten or twelve hours of play, that you must approach combat in an intelligent way or risk death*, particularly on hard or above. Standing in the open will get you killed. Not paying attention to the weaknesses of each bot will get you killed. Not planning out what you're going to do to enter an encounter, especially when you first enter an area and have no idea what to expect, will get you killed. Ignoring the environment will get you killed. Not being willing to switch between weapons in battle will get you killed.
The game opens up when you get a tripcaster, a sling, and a sniper bow AND when you take the time to collect and craft traps. Otherwise, you're shooting the basic bow at enemies that can often take a lot of abuse.
You have to pre-plan sometimes. This means scanning the enemies, seeing their weaknesses, and switching between weapons that can emphasize those weaknesses. If you're not using your sling/frost bombs against a bigger enemy that is weak to cold, you're going to get abused, for example. If you go charging into a group of enemies just thinking that you can shoot them in the face, you might take damage that you didn't need to take if you took the extra minute to lay out proximity mines or tripcaster wires that knock down even bigger enemies and leave then vulnerable to criticals. Likewise, take a second to go into detective mode and lay a marker so that you can see the paths that enemies will take. It's satisfying to nail a series of stealth kills because you used the environment to navigate a group of patrolling enemies in the right way and thus never had to fire a shot.
The best encounters in a game that I've had in years are some of the boss encounters where I could tell one was coming up, or I could see the boss up ahead, and I laid down booby traps and maneuvered the enemy right into those traps. It's incredibly satisfying to plan out a pre-battle plan and then actually pull it off! It's also satisfying when my plans go tits up, but I improvise my way out of trouble anyway.
Anyone who plays the game thinking that s/he can shoot arrows from the regular bow at a charging enemy and then just switch to melee when the enemy closes down on them is going to a) die a ton and b) think that the combat is bad. The combat is great - it's just not the type of combat that some players might expect it to be. I hate to be one of those "you're not playing the game the right way" people, but I fear that I am in this case because the game WILL punish you severely if you don't get creative and use all the weapons and traps in your arsenal. You will die going if you decide to go straight at a lot of these enemies with just the basic bow-and-melee strategy that you might use in other games to continuous success.
*This is only true of fighting robots. The human enemies are incredibly stupid and might as well kill themselves for all the trouble that they'll give you. That is the one big flaw that the combat has, I think. Otherwise, it's fantastic.
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