I think the gameplay and replayability do most of the heavy lifting here.
The gunplay is fast and fluid and strikes a very solid balance between encouraging you to switch your primary and secondary and your melee during combat. It's a ton of fun dodge rolling and blasting dudes with the coach gun or using the pistol to quick fire two dudes running me down while I reload my primary. Boss fights are all engaging and hit just the right amount of aggression. The weapon mods are also useful, though some are very distinctly much better than others. I also think the game doesn't do a great job as incentivizing you to ever really switch up your load out. I ran through with the same armor and starting guns in my entire playthrough which felt... bizarre.
The level generation is solid but never really creates standout areas but it also means level design can vary greatly between playthroughs. A playthrough with a friend had none of the same layouts as my playthrough alone. However, it feels like I was missing a large swath of the game in my recent playthrough and I don't now how much of that was just luck of the map... because I explored literally every inch of a map before I moved on.
Overall though, it's great when a game does want me to replay it a bunch without just being an endless slog of 300 hours of checklist items. The main campaign is surprisingly short for a souls like (like 15-18 hours I guess?), so if you only wanna give it one go, it's perfectly reasonable to tackle and move on.
The gunplay is fast and fluid and strikes a very solid balance between encouraging you to switch your primary and secondary and your melee during combat. It's a ton of fun dodge rolling and blasting dudes with the coach gun or using the pistol to quick fire two dudes running me down while I reload my primary. Boss fights are all engaging and hit just the right amount of aggression. The weapon mods are also useful, though some are very distinctly much better than others. I also think the game doesn't do a great job as incentivizing you to ever really switch up your load out. I ran through with the same armor and starting guns in my entire playthrough which felt... bizarre.
The level generation is solid but never really creates standout areas but it also means level design can vary greatly between playthroughs. A playthrough with a friend had none of the same layouts as my playthrough alone. However, it feels like I was missing a large swath of the game in my recent playthrough and I don't now how much of that was just luck of the map... because I explored literally every inch of a map before I moved on.
Overall though, it's great when a game does want me to replay it a bunch without just being an endless slog of 300 hours of checklist items. The main campaign is surprisingly short for a souls like (like 15-18 hours I guess?), so if you only wanna give it one go, it's perfectly reasonable to tackle and move on.