OK, a few observations and impressions:
Awesome. fun. Repetitive.
I spent a majority of my time last night just teaching myself the mechanics of the game. The movement is like third person view in Fallout. The fighting is like the Chainsword Melee in Space Marine. I found it a little clunky at first to get used to, especially with the jump mechanic (L3 to sprint, L3 a second time to jump) but I am getting used to it.
Basically you have an Ops Center as your home base, which has a Med Bay and a Crafting Station, and you can return to it as much as you want. Each time you use the Med Bay, all Adds will respawn on the level fresh. This is really nice in a lot ways, especially for targeted looting.
If you see a particular character in an area that has gear that you want blueprints for, simply go kill it (execution kill on desired loot), then run back to the Med Bay to reset Adds, then go back and kill it again as many times as you wish. You can run past the Humanoid Adds I have encountered and they will give a short chase, but they will always return to their spawn point if you go too far. This means you can literally run around throughout an entire map as long as you don't get cornered or go into a place where they are firing projectiles etc.
You need to collect Mats for upgrading your gear, and the Mats are specific to the gear piece you want to upgrade, so if you want to upgrade your Head-piece, you need to attack Adds an do execution kills with their heads targeted. It is not guaranteed that you'll get a drop from every execution kill, but drop rates are generous. The Scrap from head executions cannot be used to upgrade or craft arms or legs, etc.
You have to strike enemies to build up an energy bar to a point before the execution kill is an option, so if you're playing touch tag with an enemy and doing a lot of dodging between strikes, you can sometimes take too long between strikes and your Energy will drain and you won't be able to use the Execution kill. It just won't be available. It's a good mechanic that fosters a sense of urgency and causes you to run from killing one enemy to another if you're trying to harvest particular loot pieces.
I just kept grinding the first area until I had all my shit upgraded to MKII and brought my power core up to 41. I couldn't progress my gear any higher because all the adds were dropping MKI scrap so I left the area after defeating the boss. I didn't realize that once I left that area I couldn't return. If I had have known that I would have continued the grind to get my Core Power to level 50 so I could open that big set of doors, but ce la vie. I thought that Excavator was the boss, and I killed it and I was like "Ok, so now what?"... haha. Then I stumbled into that room completely unprepared for the Mech that I had to fight and got totally destroyed, haha!
Now that I am in the second area, I might grind out and bring my Core Power to 75 because there is a door there that is level 75 and that is a carrot on a stick to me. Hopefully I won't be shooting myself in the foot regarding the NG+ content if I do that. The next area has enemies that have all Rhino Armour and I am fully outfitted. I love the Chainsword type weapon and the Dual Claws, whatever they're called (
@GhostZ06, those dual weapons give you the backflip kick as one of the combo options).
Where they went right:
* Forcing you to choose how to use your scrap, between leveling up the Core Power or Gear
* The Dodge mechanic is ultra fast, responsive and uses little stamina
* The Stamina bar drains slowly but refills quickly under normal circumstances
* Not losing your loot when you die (not even a percentage) if you get back to it on time
* Implimenting a targeted loot system
* Implimenting a target lock-on system during combat
* Implimenting the Energy Building system
* Giving you the Drone buddy to lure enemies towards you (Fighting multiple Adds is a quick death)
Where they went wrong:
* Using the R thumbstick as the targeting thumbstick (There's got to be a better way. Think VATS)
* No way to generate health without implants
* Execution attacks should generate some health
* Making you manually break down the rusty piles of scrap (Should breakdown automatically)
* Pick-up radius is too small (For loot and for activating items)
There are some other things that I can't say are right or wrong. I am not sure how I feel about being locked into a combo. It promotes concise playing because button-mashing doesn't pay when you're fighting a giant mech that wants to literally stomp on you and you're locked into an animation with an attack combo that makes you stomp-able. I wish I could break out of the combos with the dodge button, but then again, that might make things too easy.
I feel like the heavy weapon attacks are painfully slow, and I won't use those weapons at all. They are so slow that they're useless IMO.
So far so good. They did a nice job on the animation of the Executions. I can see it getting very repetitive, but still being fun. I'll play some more tonight too and see how things progress.