The combat is dull, and excessively punishing.
Every, and I do mean every, enemy is capable of two shotting you, if not flat out 1 shotting. This might not be an issue if there was any way to effectively predict when they will hit you. But there isn't. The enemies seem to consistently stagger every time you hit them, except if they just so happened to queue up an attack that makes them immune to being staggered. How can you tell the when they do that? You can't, their attack animations look identical up until its too late. So the most effective strategy is to simply walk away from the enemy and bait them into trying to hit, then when they miss, attack them back, and simply hope they don't immediately try to hit you with one their unstaggerable attacks before you can start running away from them again.
The lack of consistent staggering might not be issue if blocking was useful. It isn't. You block two attacks before you drop your shield and stand still for 3 years while the enemy pounds away at you. It is only useful as a last measure from being hit. The only effective way to avoid damage is to run away. All of this mind you, in a game where you can only be hit by 2 attacks before you are downed.
Now all of this, might not be an issue if the game didn't feel so insistent on making you pay for dying. There's practically no point to boarding whatsoever, because if you try to board you need to kill 5+ enemies, on a rinkydinky ship without enough room to run away, and the moment you die, you get sent back to you home base. At which point, your best option to continue, is to get on a tiny schooner, and sail for 10 to 15 minutes, just to get back to you ship and continue boarding. At which point every guy you just killed on their ship won't matter, and you'll need to restart the countdown. All because you simply got hit twice in quick succession by the enemy's ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ AI. Oh and by the way, you can't fast travel during this because ship combat is still on going. No, you need to sail from you homebase, not the nearest fast travel location.
Land combat, as opposed to boarding combat has the exact opposite problem. You can place a bed literally anywhere (except your ship). So 100% of the time, you best option is to simply place down a bed, then throw yourself at the enemy 100 times as if you're Russian infantry in the second world war. They chose this absolutely awful combat system, instead of literally just giving you a little bit of extra health.
