I felt like I had to trudge through the first couple mission before things started feeling fun; but it did get fun.
It took me until about a third of the way through the game to really enjoy the abundance of combat. You're constantly getting hit by wave after wave of enemies that will come after you with knifes, rifles, lasers, and more. Some can cloak themselves, some can shoot electricity or fire from their hands, and some are big robots. There's plenty of enemies to keep you on your toes.
To fend off all these baddies you may only have your claws for equipment, but your skills are decked out with plenty of special moves and combos which are strung together by mashing the X and Square buttons. You can also grab some enemies with Triangle and toss them around, perform deadly lunge moves, which will often cause instant deaths, and do a finishing move to take out bad guys which have fallen to the ground. Kill enough enemies in a short enough time and you can go into rage mode where even more deadly moves are waiting to be unleashed.
As you fight you'll gain experience points which you can cash in for new moves and upgraded health and durability. All of this sounds fantastic, and once you get the hang of it all it does make the game fun. It's everything else that holds this title back.
The controls feel non-responsive, and moving from attack to attack does not feel fluid especially when compared to other action titles that follow a similar control scheme. More than once I found myself saying "Come on, come on, I'm pressing the button, do the thing!"
The L2 button in particular was a bit of a pain because it's used to lock on to both enemies for the lunge attacks, and objects for lunge jumps to navigate the terrain. I found that if I was in the vicinity of an object I could lunge to but wanted to clear the room first of enemies, the game would always opt for me to lock on to the object first.
When there were just the enemies running around and I would press L2 the system would often decide to pick a target that was obstructed instead of one that was in the open. Yes, you can switch targets, but couldn't they make the system a little smarter?
Context sensitive locations were also very picky about were you were standing. Square serves as the strong attack button, and the interact button. But stand to close, or just slightly to far to the side, or not quite pointing in the exact direction of the object, I end up flailing about instead of interacting. And to interact, it's not just a matter of pressing square. For some reason you have to press and hold the button. There's just no purpose to it.
I found the Quick time events that were sprinkled throughout the game a pain as well. I don't get why designers can just let you fight a boss. To me, actually fighting is more fun than watching the bottom of the screen for a shape to appear; and in this game they really put a lot of emphasis on the QUICK part of Quick Time Event. The most frustrating part is when you were in the middle of performing a combo, you start the part where you have to press the Square button a couple times, then the game quickly shoot you to a QTE without warning, and the first button to press is an X, and oops because you were trying to pull off that combo you messed everything up. Then let's say you try again. Okay X is first again. Cool, it doesn't seem random. Then Circle, oh, too late. Try again. Okay X again, then circle, then triangle, oh too late, try again. Okay, X, then square, what? Yeah, they decide to switch it up on you just for "fun". Look, either make it random, or don't.
There's also QTEs when doing your lunges to jump from object to object (say up a side of a cliff), where you have to use the L-Stick instead of the buttons on the right of the controller, but those are more forgiving, so not as annoying.
The final issue that holds the game back is the camera. It's often too close to you, too high up, or spends more time showing you where you came from instead of where you're going. This makes it hard to do your lunge attacks, as you can only perform them where there's an enemy on the screen, and to see what's coming up next.
Thankfully a lot of these issues just take some getting used to, and once you do, you can have more fun with all the intense action. This is one of those titles where going up against all the lackeys on your way to where you're going is the best part of the game.