edit: I'm good at the game now, the bosses are awesome actually. 10/10 From give me more robots right NOW

tl;dr: 9/10. Punishing but fun. Skill and strategy required, recommended you learn to gain joy from hours of build customization and tweaking. Bosses, the usual From draw, are just OK, but there's more to the game than bosses. Slight performance issues.

Once again From releases a banger. The versatility is probably the strongest selling point: you can customise every aspect of your mech to suit any playstyle -- mostly. The gameplay loop centers around exceeding an enemy's attitude stability: basically breaking their posture, staggering them for a moment and causing them to take much more damage for a short while. There's many routes to this end but if you just ignore the stagger system you'll have a bad time. The extent of customizability combined with the difficulty means you can't really just plug-and-play. You won't get through with random parts and button mashing; you need to pick a strategy, build around it, and consciously enact it. For instance, I've landed on being as nimble as possible and staying either next to or directly above an opponent; as for killing them, I run two weapons to deal chunks of attitude damage, one to finish the bar off, and a melee weapon to capitalize. Probably half my hours are just me playing dress-up and putting my build through all kinds of situations -- there's even a dedicated test run feature for you to play with your builds, but the NPC AC combat arena and replaying missions were what really showed me holes in my strategy.

My only real complaint about the gameplay is that the bosses can be lackluster. Most are pretty forgettable, several are memorable for the wrong reasons: some are incredible spectacles but are downright pathetic, while some are absurdly hard compared to what preceded them. There's only been a couple bosses whom I get annoyed just thinking about, but unlike past From games there's none whose existence thrills me. Of course there's so much more to the game than the bosses, but it's still unfortunate.

My other complaint is some performance issues. You'll definitely want to meet the minimum specs; I have a solid gaming rig and I still get problems on a few missions. Also the game crashes once in a blue moon, losing my last bit of progress, but it's not often enough to be any more than a mild annoyance if I lost some hard-won progress.

edit: I'm good at the game now, the bosses are awesome actually. 10/10 From give me more robots right NOW tl;dr: 9/10. Punishing but fun. Skill and strategy required, recommended you learn to gain joy from hours of build customization and tweaking. Bosses, the usual From draw, are just OK, but there's more to the game than bosses. Slight performance issues. Once again From releases a banger. The versatility is probably the strongest selling point: you can customise every aspect of your mech to suit any playstyle -- mostly. The gameplay loop centers around exceeding an enemy's attitude stability: basically breaking their posture, staggering them for a moment and causing them to take much more damage for a short while. There's many routes to this end but if you just ignore the stagger system you'll have a bad time. The extent of customizability combined with the difficulty means you can't really just plug-and-play. You won't get through with random parts and button mashing; you need to pick a strategy, build around it, and consciously enact it. For instance, I've landed on being as nimble as possible and staying either next to or directly above an opponent; as for killing them, I run two weapons to deal chunks of attitude damage, one to finish the bar off, and a melee weapon to capitalize. Probably half my hours are just me playing dress-up and putting my build through all kinds of situations -- there's even a dedicated test run feature for you to play with your builds, but the NPC AC combat arena and replaying missions were what really showed me holes in my strategy. My only real complaint about the gameplay is that the bosses can be lackluster. Most are pretty forgettable, several are memorable for the wrong reasons: some are incredible spectacles but are downright pathetic, while some are absurdly hard compared to what preceded them. There's only been a couple bosses whom I get annoyed just thinking about, but unlike past From games there's none whose existence thrills me. Of course there's so much more to the game than the bosses, but it's still unfortunate. My other complaint is some performance issues. You'll definitely want to meet the minimum specs; I have a solid gaming rig and I still get problems on a few missions. Also the game crashes once in a blue moon, losing my last bit of progress, but it's not often enough to be any more than a mild annoyance if I lost some hard-won progress.