I decided to not watch anything past the first reveal trailer, and that was probably the best decision I could have made.
I didn’t expect to love this game, I thought I’d play for like 3 hours and quit. but I was surprised with how solid the gameplay was. It’s fairly simple, but that’s the beauty of it.
You trek across America trying to rebuild the country by reconnecting the “chiral network”. You’ll have to traverse through BT zones, timefall, strong winds, harsh mountains covered in snow, etc. The movement system is pretty bare bones but also solid, you’ll have to manage your cargo depending on the environment and weather, and if you carry too much you’ll have to actively rebalance yourself to make sure it doesn’t topple over. The management is satisfying, like say you have to travel through strong winds coming from your left, you’ll have to constantly lean your character to the left to fight the wind, orrrr you could rearrange your cargo to allocate more weight to your left which will make it easier to traverse. The inventory management feels great and just gets better as you progress and unlock more blueprints (like which skeleton to use to help you get to your destination, or which guns to keep on you to deal with MULEs, etc.) every once in a while you’ll have to deal with MULEs who want to take your cargo, but they’re quite easy to take out. You can raid their camp to get a shit ton of materials to put into fabrications or to build structures to help yourself and other players traverse the terrain.
Throughout the game you’ll encounter big BTs that you have to actually kill to progress, which is where the game starts having some problems. The gunplay feels very stiff, it’s not very satisfying.
Another con is the vehicle handling. Driving the truck is so frustratingly difficult, its not even worth trying, and the motorcycle is little better but the turning on it feels a tad stiff and tanky.

The story is confusing at the start but it comes together in the last 6 hours. Characters like Deadman are very likeable. Though there are some iffy lines like “I'm princess beach” which just makes you cringe, but those aren’t very common. Very easy to follow the story, unlike Metal Gear (dear god)

Overall: While the game will definitely be divisive, I enjoyed my time with it, and feel like Kojima delivered exactly what I wanted from this game.
I personally recommend this game to anyone who is on the fence about it.

This game can't make up its mind if it wants to be a grand story, or an open-world immersive sandbox. The story is great and probably one of Rockstar's best, but everything falls apart when it comes to the gameplay. The gunplay is still shit, the movement feels delayed, and the constant mashing of the sprint button is the most annoying shit.
The camp system had a lot of potential to make this game stand out from other Rockstar titles, but they made that shit useless, the hunger system didn't really matter as the penalty of not eating wasn't that grand, and the morality system had no effect on Arthur's actions.

I really wanted to enjoy this game, but I just can't.