I wanted to prove the haters wrong. I wanted to find a beautiful, smart, understated gem at the heart of this thing, but it's just not there.
There are the bones of something special. The sound design on the EInherjar stories is excellent and makes me wish there was either more to them or more of them-- having only four should give the game breathing room to give richer stories to each, but it doesn't seize on that. The side missions feel quaintly irrelevant and small-scale at first but quickly reveal themselves to be anonymous and thematically unfocused. The enemies are punishing (on Hard difficulty) in a way that starts interesting but grates over the course of seeing the same half-dozen enemy types reskinned over and over.
I don't know why I still hold such a blazing torch of reverence for this series (or IP as I guess is more accurate to think of it) but I was really hopeful that there would be something more special than I found here.
How nostalgic, as they say.