https://youtu.be/SPOA5OfP9uc
They played the game together and made a stream talking about the game. It's in Italian and I recommend to listen to it if you speak the language. It's completely spoiler free. I'll translate some interesting information I got out of the review.
A premise: I don't know much about Phenrir, outside of her review of the game on Eurogamer.it, which I also recommend.
https://www.eurogamer.it/articles/2019-11-01-death-stranding-recensione
I know Sabaku better. He's a big fan of the Souls games, and Fumito Ueda's work. He loves Kojima's games but was very critical of MGSV, mostly about the narrative.
They both spent the majority of time talking about how the game handles the core gameplay loop, and relatively little about the combat sections. I'm going to share what they said about the combat:
-
On normal, the game is really easy. Sabaku said he can't imagine what the game might be like on Very Easy. He thinks that Kojima tried to make the game as accessible as possible to non-action games fans, but he recommends anyone, even people who don't usually play action games, to play on Hard, because the difficulty is apparently absent in combat on the lower difficulties. From his experience the difficulty options only change the combat, nothing else.
-
The combat in general feels underdeveloped compared to everything else. The boss battles are fun, but uninspired and involving very basic and primitive mechanics. The later ones do look amazing though. He praised the gunplay, but claims that while it's good gunplay, it doesn't feel smartly implemented. You have a variety of guns, but don't have incentives to use them, and the combat encounters with MULEs are very easy. Basically, it doesn't feel like the same care went into this part of the game that went into MGSV. To me it sounds like when a non-stealth game has stealth sequences that aren't very fleshed out. The core of the game is not with combat. Don't expect the MULE camps to feel like a mini-MGSV, basically. I expect the combat to be surface level, which I guess is fine for what basically amounts to a side feature, but hopefully it can also be fun despite the simplicity of the mechanics and the low difficulty.
-
They agree that the MULEs AI is mediocre. They claim that from a distance they can actually show some surprising amount of realism, for example she talked about when she saw a MULE running terrified towards a MULE truck because of the Timefall, while the one drivin
