The level of mastery over the craft on display in this game is staggering. The sheer impressive-ness of making the ballsy move to indroduce a new, well fleshed out mechanic, and then just drop it after a comfortable amount of time and move on to the next one puts it leagues ahead of games years after it, and likely will keep it as ahead of the pack for years to come. The level of care and passion seeping off every angle of this game will keep it at the front of your mind for years to come. It's no wonder everyone who's played it has adamantly advertised for it ever since, its quality needs to be seen to be believed, and it leaves a ray of hope for the future of game design.

That fight in chapter 3. "Lets see how far they can fly... on borrowed wings. This is gaming, unironically saved my life.

Completed my first playthrough, roughly 20 hours. This is everything i've wanted in a mecha game. At first I was dissapointed that I was getting stuck on each new boss introduced, as I wanted to stick to one build and it felt as if the game would force me to make a new build with weapons etc. (not saying this is a bad thing but it just wasn't for me). However as the game progresses and you upgrade your OS, you can pretty much use whatever build you want. The combat system makes the bosses in this game much more difficult than any I've faced in From's previous titles.

When Handler Walter slides into my DMs asking me if I want to be tossed around by different corpos just looking for another mech jockey to fly in and spray bullets, the answer is always yes.
At first, it's just to get another chance to jump into your insane death robot. Piloting your mech feels crisp and responsive, the mission environments absolutely whip in a dystopian kind of way, and there's an endless swiss army knife of weaponry and kit options waiting for you back at the garage that promise to make your next excursion feel fresh. Each new mission sells you further on the rules of Rubicon. You're sold to the highest corpo bidder, often times it'll be the execs who saw you tear through their wage slaves in the previous mission and want to strike back at your former masters. Even when you're hired by the rebel forces who want to kick the parasitic corpos off Rubicon, you'll find that they still have to buy their guns from their enemies because everything in this world costs credits. Even the ammo you spend each mission gets deducted from your paycheck.
Eventually, those shiny bits of gameplay start to grow stale. Almost all of the weapon loadouts can be reduced to holding down L2 + R2 to mow down waves of trivial mobs and even when you hit those insane boss battle difficulty spikes, most of the challenge there is just trying to keep them on screen long enough to pump lead. Because of that, the missions end up feeling like stretches of filler to get you to the next set piece boss encounter.
Still finished the game though because I ended up caring about how this story and its characters would end up. And I would never ever let down my road dawg V.IV Rusty.

After almost two whole months I have finished the main adventure and it's the most fun I had with a CRPG since "Kingmaker" (have not gone through "Wrath of The Righetous" yet). While there's a lot of good here, there are also small bits that bring down the game a little, which I'm sure will be addressed in the upcoming months (so I'm leaving it at 9/10 for now).

The first two acts are really strong and work really well in not making you notice you're being rail-roaled and have a great sense of freedom in how you approach every encounter, but the "dread" act 3 takes a dive, not as strong as other say in my opinion, but there's a lot to do in Baldur's Gate and not much relevant to the overall plot. Granted, not all sidequests in a game have to, but in the previous acts it seemed as if the side quests naturally branched from the same tree, as opposed to act 3 where you do stuff because you just "where around". And, without giving spoilers away, the end of the final act presents you with a pretty narrow set of choices that could really be summed up in "choose which body guard will jump in front of the bullet", when in previous acts you would've had the option to deviate the bullet, get the president out of the way or kill the shooter before they even get the chance to aim.

That said, this game has the stronguest set of companions of the overall series if we take into account there are no wet farts like Cernd, though some still have the short end of the stick. The trash mobs are greatly reduced and the combat even though it is turn-based it goes way faster, specially since the new system doesn't really on 5 minutes of pre-battle buffing and countles attempts at breaching the enemies magical defenses.

Still though, bring back Jan Jansen.