The snow area did drag a little, but I think that's more that the first two areas were too big (because of the unnecessary Ubisoft map and collectables) so you end up playing way longer in them than the pacing can handle.
Fortunately its also the shortest by far. You can probably wrap the whole game and all the sidequests in like a few hours if you ignore the collectables.
What really got me going was multiplayer
For a tacked on, months later added, multiplayer mode it was incredibly fun. My only issue with it was that the high difficulty means you jump from "hop in and have a good time with randos" to "you need to bring your own team with full comms and coordination" without much warning. Perhaps it got better down the line, but that first big boss was a nightmare.
But yeah, the combat system is really what made that game so fun. Once you get in your groove and have all your tools its just flows and feels cinematic (despite not being so, take notes Sony).
Oh i forgot to mention. When i was playing multiplayer i had a console game moment and my multiplayer save file didn't save properly and got corrupted. I downloaded a save file from nexus that had all of the unlocks and with that i just skipped all of the grind the mode would have me do and just enjoyed fighting the mobs with my fren. The story and arena modes themselves were fine though high ping coupled with enemy magnetism doesn't help but the uh... dungeon/raid mode was entertaining when we had a crew to play it through with but it only happened once.
The snow area did drag a little, but I think that's more that the first two areas were too big (because of the unnecessary Ubisoft map and collectables) so you end up playing way longer in them than the pacing can handle.
Fortunately its also the shortest by far. You can probably wrap the whole game and all the sidequests in like a few hours if you ignore the collectables.
For a tacked on, months later added, multiplayer mode it was incredibly fun. My only issue with it was that the high difficulty means you jump from "hop in and have a good time with randos" to "you need to bring your own team with full comms and coordination" without much warning. Perhaps it got better down the line, but that first big boss was a nightmare.
But yeah, the combat system is really what made that game so fun. Once you get in your groove and have all your tools its just flows and feels cinematic (despite not being so, take notes Sony).
Oh i forgot to mention. When i was playing multiplayer i had a console game moment and my multiplayer save file didn't save properly and got corrupted. I downloaded a save file from nexus that had all of the unlocks and with that i just skipped all of the grind the mode would have me do and just enjoyed fighting the mobs with my fren. The story and arena modes themselves were fine though high ping coupled with enemy magnetism doesn't help but the uh... dungeon/raid mode was entertaining when we had a crew to play it through with but it only happened once.