>>But the combat itself is so crisp
>
>what do you mean by "crisp?" it looks floaty and
>animation-driven.

It has the complexity of The Witcher 3's combat in that different enemies have specific weaknesses (including, which is probably a Monster Hunter thing, weak points) and swapping weapons and abilities is on-the-fly via a slow motion screen that doesn't pause the action, but you feel in control on the level of Uncharted 4. In that sense, it's certainly animation driven in that you're not canceling or doing super complex combos ala DmC or a fighting game, but it's super fun to set enemies up for failure and like somebody else said, any time you forget you have options other than your basic arrows you're in for a real bad time with the medium and larger sized enemies.

It is also very satisfying to wrangle a herd with a bunch of stun ropes, tie them all down while they're spazzing out and then just crit them one by one to loot them. Coupled with the beautiful world (and I'm still just in the starter zone) it's fun to just wander around hunting things so I can buy the slingshot and sniper bow.

One of my favorite things to do lately has been finding huge herds with a few Grazers, hitting their Blaze canisters with a fire arrow and watching the chaos ensue as a chain of explosions rips through the herd and leaves me to pick off the crippled stragglers.

Just for the visual, I also love doing the power slide, drawing my bow, going into slow motion focus and trying to hit a Watcher in the eye. The robot animations are consistently awesome when they're aggravated, and they look super cool in slow motion. Also, in an early cinematic they show Aloy doing a power slide under an enemy to hit its weak point, and that's definitely a thing that's relevant to certain robots later on.

I will say, if you've grown weary of the climbing in Uncharted or Assassin's Creed, you'll either be really happy or really bored with what this game does. You don't need to hold a button and you often don't even need to actively jump from ledge to ledge, as 80% of the time simply holding up will get Aloy from hand-hold to hand-hold. It's the most poorly designed bit of the game so far for me because when you DO get held up by a need to find the next hand-hold it can sometimes leave me confused for two or three minutes as to where I'm supposed to go. They do the yellow platform handholding like Uncharted thing but they also do the white platform handholding like Witcher and it leads to some real confusion because while the yellow one are always grippable, sometimes the white is just art, though not very often. But it is a weird design choice.

I still haven't done much human combat yet, but I thought it all felt just fine in what little I played. Again, this may be because I'm playing on Hard and the game really gives me the sense its Hard difficulty is a very fairly balanced challenge compared to how I feel about most Hard modes, so it could just be that Medium difficulty is pretty primed to get you moving through the story. I don't have an answer for that. Like I said in the first post, I neeeeever play Hard modes other than random second play throughs on games I really love, but I rarely play those more than 50% of the way through, so the fact that I'm really enjoying Hard here is a big credit to the game IMO (for comparison, The Last of Us is a game I frequently hear felt built for Hard modes, but I couldn't get into it that way).

The melee doesn't have much variety from what I've seen but it has a fun balance of being quite dangerous because one hit, even several hours in, from most basic enemies can send you reeling, and its also got a pretty good stretch on it that makes it really reliable for hunting animals and finishing off crippled robots.


the arrows seem to travel slowly and curve
>to their target, skeleton archers in dark souls-style. that
>may be an end of game thing. there's no weight or heft behind
>anything.

I feel the exact opposite, so maybe that's just looking at the game versus watching it more than anything. Aloy feels a little weird during the tutorial sequence but main game feels fine, and the early bows have pretty long draw times that put major import behind each arrow you fire. There's nothing more disappointing and tension building than a robot moving its head just as you release your arrow, missing the critical hit and alerting the entire herd to your presence. Suddenly you're scrambling all over the zone, flipping from weapon to weapon desperate for a way to whittle 7 enemies down to one and realizing you hadn't rooted up any medical herbs in a while because you got overconfident you were getting powerful enough to take some hits, only to go from 290 to 80 health in a single kick and jump to the edge of your seat to get your dodges on point.


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