I'd recommend it.
They did a great job on New York City. It's fun to explore, and packed with detail and visual storytelling everywhere you look. I'm guessing most of that detail is lost on a good percentage of the players whose only concern is to sprint max speed to the next loot drop, and that's kind of sad really. "There's no story!" Bullshit, it's all over the place if you care to slow down and see it.
The gameplay is a lot of fun. All of the guns feel good to shoot, and each one feels unique - even those of the same type. The weapon mod system is great, and can make each weapon handle quite differently. An AK-47 with "x" mods will be quite a different beast compared to another AK-47 with "y" mods. The cover system works well. You're able to move into and out of cover easily without having to fight the controls.
The character skills, talents, and perks are fun to use. I love that you aren't locked into any particular class and can change up your character whenever you feel like it. You can spec into your typical healer/tank/DPS builds, a solo build, or mix and match if you don't have a full squad and need to plug some holes.
I love the fact that they separated gear from appearance items. The gear you use is reflected on your character (things like gloves and kneepads do have different looks to them), but the most noticeable items are the appearance items like jackets and pants. These are purely cosmetic items so you can change up your look as often as you like.
I think the enemies are quite good. Sure, they're all humans, but each faction has their own style. They each use their own types of weapons and skills, and as you progress in the game their AI gets better and better. For example, Rioters use a lot of the smaller weapons like pistols and SMG's, and they don't use a whole lot of tactics against you. That makes sense because they're supposed to be just regular people. The top tier guys though, they can wreck your shit. They use the military-grade weapons, use tactics like flanking and placing snipers on high ground, and use some of the same skills we as players can use like deploying turrets and healing each other.
The UI is gorgeous. I know some people don't like all the floaty bits, but I think the augmented reality look is fantastic. It's also fairly customizable, with things like toggling button prompts and auto-hide. The one exception is the appearance menu. That thing is hot garbage. It's sorted reverse-alphabetically with the new stuff you pick up placed at the bottom of the list - in other words, exactly the opposite any sane human being would want it.
It's not all good though.
There are some strange audio/visual bugs. One or all of your weapons will stop making noise when you join a group, or things like the explosion effects of your sticky bomb won't show on screen. That's all I've experienced myself, but I know there are some other more serious issues. One super strange one I've read about is being locked out of your account if you craft a high-end backpack and logout with it mostly full? Like WTF? Based on my own personal experience though I have to say it's one of the more technically polished games to come out in recent memory.
There's too much RNG. Whether or not you get a good loot drop is dependant on RNG, and whether or not that item has decent stats is also dependent on RNG. So there's RNG on top of more RNG combined with a somewhat low rate of drops to begin with and you end up with a pretty slow-moving treadmill. They're repeating the same mistakes other devs made in Diablo III and Destiny. I've read that a lot of players really want them to adopt what Blizzard did with the Reaper of Souls expansion. I haven't played that myself, but it seems like the gold standard for loot games at this point so I'm all for it.
I haven't reached the end game grind yet so I can't really comment on that. I've heard it's not that great, but I'm not really the kind of player that does a lot of grinding anyway. Some grinding, sure, particularly if I've got nothing else to play, but I'm not obsessive about it. I'm level 30 with just a few main missions to complete, and after that's done I'm guessing I'll be done playing until they release new content. Whatever weapons and gear I've got when that time comes is just going to have to suffice.
I've got my money's worth for sure, clocking in probably 100 hours once all is said and done.
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