This is the most middling 'Yes' I've ever had to give to a game. I enjoyed it overall, I suppose, but it has its issues. I'll start with the positives though. The gunplay and combat is amazing, the enemy variety and boss diversity is solid, and the sceneries and landscapes you go through are gorgeous. The difficulty creeps up just right, and mechanically skilled players could probably even enter the game immediately on Hardcore and feel fine. I loved the traits system, and they felt like it impacted your playthrough at just the exact sweet spot it needed to be in.
Now for the negatives. For starters, there was this awful stuttering that took me days to solve. The stutter was a consistent frame drop every two or three seconds that froze the game screen and made it impossible to play. The solution to this (for me specifically; not sure if others experienced this or not) was to launch the game with a specific command of '-dx11' which forces the game to run on DirectX 11 instead of the default DirectX 12 which apparently has issues with running the game for me.
Beyond that, the impact of the player on the world felt very lackluster in the second and third act. Initially, the game started off well with NPCs back at home reacting to major game events that the player achieves, such as praising the player's character for beating a certain boss or such. However, when you get to the later parts with the Labyrinth and further, they basically stop reacting. There's no reaction or visible effect to what you do with the guardian's heart, or which bosses you kill, or whatever happens with the rebellion against the immortal nobles; none of these have any effect whatsoever on your world. It's as if they may as well not have happened. Heck, even meeting the founder of Ward 13, the big man Ford himself, was just a few lines of dialogue. All that build up, and for what? He doesn't even show up at base to meet his granddaughter again, or get a reaction to seeing his wife being a formerly merged human-root monster. The worst part is at the very end, when you kill the final boss and the game just abruptly ends. It doesn't show you any reaction of the NPCs even though you just basically made one huge step towards saving their world. It doesn't give you the satisfaction of an ending that it should have deserved. It was disappointing.
There's other issues I have, such as a lack of loadouts or a need for a bestiary, but those are mainly just QoL type of nitpicks. Again, I enjoyed my playthrough for the most part, but man it's difficult to give an enthusiastic recommendation. If you're getting this game, get it if you just want to shoot at enemies and fight cool bosses. If you actually care about experiencing a satisfying story with a solid ending, look elsewhere. That, or buy the full version because apparently the satisfying ending is locked behind a DLC. They can bet their silly bottoms I ain't paying for a DLC just to get an ending that should've been in the base game in the first place. Ha.
