izigame.me

The story itself was excellent, and it's the one reason why I ultimately enjoyed my time playing the game. It's told in a very unique and effective way, and I haven't ever really seen another game do it how NieR:Automata has. It's too bad it takes somewhere around 15-20h to actually get to the good parts. Before then, the game feels more like a chore. I won't go into detail as to why the story is great, but it'd be a disservice to say it's great solely because of the philosophical aspect that most people seem to praise it for.
The combat is perfectly passable, but if you want deep and engaging combat, look somewhere else. The combat here is very button mashy, and the only thing that takes any kind of skill is pressing dodge at the right time. Even if you fail, using a healing item is near instant, and you can do so for no cost other than having to buy more later with the mountains of money you're bound to have. It's clear the combat was made to be cool looking and smooth, rather than challenging and engaging. It's not my cup of tea, but it's definitely not an issue I couldn't get over.
Character progression is very tedious. The three things that define your strength is player level, weapon level and OS-chips. Player level is very self explanatory: kill enemies and do quests, gain XP, get stronger. Weapon levels are also very simple, but also very tedious. The game wants you to go looking for ingredients to upgrade your weapon of choice, but never tells you where they are or how to get them. It's not hard to do or anything, it's just tedious and confusing. OS-chips are probably the biggest hurdle in progression. They're equipable upgrades that effect you in very boring yet crucial ways like gaining more XP or dealing more damage. On top of that, to get any kind of use out of them, you must merge them, which only really serves to make the whole system more unintuitive. The devs clearly realized the whole system was extremely boring and unintuitive, since they made it so that the game can just pick your upgrades for you. Unfortunately the game isn't very good at picking them, so you're better off doing it yourself anyway.
My biggest gripe is the "open world". The world is open for absolutely no reason other than for marketing purposes. There's no kind of freedom here, you're always just following the map markers. Most of the areas can't even be explored until the main quest requires you to do so. To make things even worse, the devs made dozens of uninspiring and boring side quests that add no kind of value other than to pad for time. The quest markers can't even be turned off until quests are completed or failed, meaning that your minimap is always filled with a billion map markers. (Technically they can be, but not in a way that makes any kind of sense to actually do). This game would most definitely have been considerably better if only it was a linear experience that took less time to complete.
Overall I don't regret buying and playing the game, I just find it nigh impossible to recommend it to anyone in good conscience. The game is tedious and long, with only really the story being the main good point about it. I got the game on sale, and I'm happy I did, as I don't think I would've gotten my money's worth otherwise.