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Finished main campaign with a friend (pretty short, only about 13ish hours), now doing a solo playthrough for finding extra bosses/dungeons and then gonna do DLC.
Wow! What a pleasant and unexpected surprise. I had my eye on this game for a little while now, being drawn in by the world and art style. I almost jumped in solo, but found a friend to play through with.
From the top, many people call it a third person shooter spin on Dark Souls, and that's about as close to the truth as you can get with a simple explanation. I could already gush a long time about this game, but I'll just break down a few of my favorite points, as well as some points that I'm mixed on. I'll try to be spoiler-lite for those who like lore and world in their games.

LIKED:

- COMBAT: I know this is very general, but the moment to moment combat and gameplay feels very strong. My friend and I started at Normal difficulty, and at first we were worried it was going to be too easy - the first "areas" felt incredibly unthreatening. While I'm sure we could have still bumped up the difficulty, Normal difficulty still ramped up to give us a bit of a challenge in the worlds and especially bosses while not being too sweaty. Keep in mind the i-frames for your dodges are very forgiving so use your dodges as much as you can. If you want more of a challenge, definitely either play solo or bump up the difficulty once or twice as a group. There ended up being a lot more enemy variety than I expected, the boss fights are mostly very unique and fun, and it just feels good to play. WARNING: Try to figure out what difficulty you want to stick with early on in the game, because I believe you have to re-roll your entire campaign if you want to adjust the difficulty, unfortunately.
- GEAR: Let's be clear, this isn't a LOOTER SHOOTER. Although the combat loop might play closer to an ARPG, there isn't loot raining from enemies. Loot is curated well by the developers, mainly unlocked from hidden areas, vendors, or drops from bosses, and the worlds themselves are full of basically crafting materials that help you to upgrade your gear. The armors all have different set bonuses, encouraging you to either mix and match for a lot of different passives, or double down on a particular set if you really like a set bonus for your build. Weapons, accessories, and "mods" (get to that in a second) are all easily swappable and encourage build experimentation.
"Mods" are basically your abilities, and they are attached directly to your weapons for the most part. So you're only going to probably have at max a few abilities equipped at a time, but again, since they exist as "mods" that can attach to items, they are easily swappable. (There are certain unique mods that are tied to specific weapons/items that cannot be swapped) There are some really really cool abilities attached to different mods, items, weapons, and armors that can create very unique builds depending on your playstyle.
- REPLAYABILITY/CHOICE: We tried to mainly play through this game blind, but every now and then we would look something up on the wiki if we were confused, and there are a LOT of things in this game that encourage you to replay. For instance, there are entire bosses that will randomly spawn in a playthrough, and in other playthroughs they won't spawn at all. This also happens with random events and side quests. Even with certain bosses, depending on HOW you approach them or defeat them can completely change the encounter or the loot at the end of the fight - you can even outright avoid or cause boss fights, depending on your choices.
However, some people might already be thinking "aw man, does that mean if I find out about an item/quest/choice that I missed or should have done differently way after the fact, I have to either start the game over completely or wait until my next playthrough?" Thankfully, the devs thought of this, as well. Without going into too much detail, you can basically "re-roll" or "re-instance" certain areas specifically for this sort of thing, without affecting the main campaign progress of that character. Awesome.
- LOOOOOORE: You can just blaze through this game and skip the story if you're not into that sort of thing. A ton of lore is kept in journals, computer terminals, and other things lying around the world. NPCs who have a ton of lore for you even give you a way to skip their dialogue or tell them you're not interested.
However, if you ARE interested, there is a LOT of lore for you to dig into! My friend and I took it slow, read lore bits everywhere we could find them, exhausted NPC dialogue options, and really really enjoyed getting pulled into the world. If you're a fan of eldritch/cosmic horror type stuff like me, you'll probably like this.
- ROGUELITE MODE: My friend and I pretty much waited for each other to come online before continuing our story progress, but during a lunch break one day I really had the itch to play more without messing up our co-op progress. That's when I saw the Survival mode. At some point the devs updated the game with a Roguelite mode - start from scratch at a hub world, enter dungeon, fight boss, return to hub world for more upgrades, rinse repeat. It's honestly a lot of fun, and even though you don't carry any of that loot out of the mode, you can unlock a specific currency that can be used to buy transmog items in the main game. Pretty cool, imo, and yet more awesome replayability.

MIXED:

- MELEE: With the inspiration this game took from Soulsborne games, I tried to be more melee focused at the beginning of the game. I was actually thinking ammo would run out a lot faster and be a lot more scarce (it might be at higher difficulties), but the melee in this game doesn't feel... great. It's not bad! But at least on Normal difficulty, we found ourselves mostly resorting to ranged stuff and only using melee when I was in a bad spot or needed to push through a couple enemies to get more ammo. Some melee weapons feel better than others, though, so it's possible it just didn't click with me. Someone who possibly focuses on a melee focused build might enjoy it better, but I do hope they work on the overall feel of melee combat for the sequel. (Note: After playing the game more, I feel a bit more positive on this aspect, but I still do hope they improve on melee in the sequel.)

DISLIKED:

- CO-OP STORY PROGRESSION: This is not an issue that affected me personally, but I wanted to mention it since I found out about it. Co-op progression seems to only be tied to the HOST of that session. Yes, connected friends will unlock items and character progression that will remain persistent, but if they return to their own world, none of that story progress will count. My friend and I only played when we were both online so this wasn't an issue for us, but it's something to keep in mind.
Will update this review once I'm done with the main campaign and maybe dabble with DLC, but all in all this game was a wonderful surprise and I'm greatly enjoying it. I honestly think it's probably worth it at full price. If it's on sale and you're on the fence, I highly recommend it even more.