Overall - it's all right.
The game goes for fast-paced action, giving you the option of carrying two firearms, a sword as well up to three skills. Firearms are fairly standard - assault rifles, smgs, pistols, revolvers, DMR / sniper weapons in both physical and energy varieties. Swords are just swords, really. Weapons vary in stats such as fire rate, magazine, etc., so there is some difference even among specific categories. There is a dodge in the form of a slide with a cooldown. Unfortunately, later on you are swarmed with enemies in small arenas giving little maneuverability, so the slide dodge cooldown is felt heavily, especially with certain enemy types (haymakers come to mind). The combat is responsive, and it tries to encourage movement, but then often hems you in with tiny arenas. Still, you have options to help counteract this with various skills and abilities, and healing is a possibility through both.
Loot you find can vary in quality, coming equipped with perks (that can't be changed) that increase damage types, change health regeneration, so on. High quality loot pieces can also be fitted with cards, which essentially act as gems or runestones for sockets. They aren't particularly exciting though, usually boiling down to percent increases to things such as health, shields and damage. If you collect enough of them you can 'forge' them (upgrade them) to the next level, but the power increases are miniscule per card and often require enormous amounts of resources, thus leading to immense grinding requirements.
The campaign is short, so you'll be grinding side missions for better loot. I don't have much play time, and apparently getting an 'S' rank for a mission is a pretty rare achievement, which is crazy because the early missions aren't that hard. The scoring system is silly though, as all it cares about is comboing kills, switching weapons, using skills, and performing takedowns. It doesn't really matter all that much how much damage you take - I've had missions where I consistently almost died in each combat arena, but I still received S and S+ ranks because I just mixed up all my attacks and skill usage. That suggests to me that the devs understand that the arenas are tiny, your dodge cooldown is circumstantially high, and you're going to take damage, possibly a lot of it.
It's worth it on sale, but certainly not at full price. It's a nice break to take here and there, playing a mission or two for an hour or so.
