It's like a slightly better Dying Light 2, but that's not a high bar
You have a hidden stamina bar that's just used for sprinting, and then you have a visible stamina bar exclusively used for combat. Except if you have the Dash skill, then the visible stamina bar can also be used for sprinting, but the invisible stamina bar can still run out while you're depleting the visible stamina bar, stopping you from sprinting. This segregated stamina system seems like a poorly thought out attempt at reducing the amount of stamina management and speeding up the pace of the game, but feels very amateurish. I believe they even backported this into Dying Light 2, too
Another lovely change they've made is adding extra inputs to activate skills. You now have to press not two, not four, but three (3) buttons just to dropkick a zombie. If it's their attempt to make the skill less appealing, then I guess it succeeded. Maybe they could have made the rest of the combat more appealing instead though.
There's almost no real passive skills, they all require additional button presses to make any use of them. Nearly every skill that could be considered "passive" are just crafting unlocks, or reduced vehicle damage or fuel usage (because of training, I guess)
We are now three games deep into this series and the developers still haven't figured out that if you can open a menu (such as the inventory or map) with a key, that the same key should also close it. You can hold the inventory key for half a second to close specific menus, but they would rather have you reach all the way over to ESC key. Except for the skill tree menu, for some reason that one can be closed with the key you opened it with.
Speaking of keybinds, you'll may run into fun situations where you receive a distress call, and to answer it, you need to press and hold the Flashlight keybind. Shared keybinds are fine, but for as long as that distress call prompt is up, you cannot toggle your flashlight, even if you're in the middle of a stealth section where turning off your flashlight would be ideal. The prompt and the flashlight cannot have their keybinds decoupled.
The writing is just as terrible as ever, so nothing has changed in that department: "He's already more compliant and obedient than you ever were." Plenty of typos too, unless the writers really don't know the difference between "effect" and "affect"
