By skyforbes It's incredibly pretty, and it's at least not frustrating to play but it's genuinely not fun.
Main critiques:
-tired open world design. 1 million things to do on the map and none of it is thst compelling or fun. Follow a fox for five minutes. Climb up a mountain that isn't challenging in any way. Get into the same boring fights
-combat. (This might be a personal preference situation) it's annoying when games force you to block or parry in order to damage enemies. Blocking and parrying should be imo options in combat that reward timing and mastery but not requirements. Every fight ends up being using a quick fire tool or just sitting around waiting to parry or guard break in order to get lethal damage. It's border line lock and key game play and it sucks. It's time gating with extra steps.
-combat (part 2). Actual lock and key gameplay. The weapon selection system to counter other weapons is just boring. And the controls for swapping don't feel great. Tons of times where I think i swapped weapons but I didn't give it enough time or something. If you don't use the correct weapon you seem to be heavily penalized. Combat is so boring that I usually choose stealth options to avoid having to fight. Boss fights exaggerate the issue because they are so long.
Additionally the fact that enemies basically warp towards you with attacks there is no maintaining spacing in a fight. If an enemy queues up an attack it will hit you if you dont block parry or dodge. Your are basically never just out of range of an attack. It just forces you into one way to play.
-writing/ story. Also personal preference but I think it's just genuinely bad. There is so much dialog in this game that doesn't matter. Characters just talking with 0 consequence. And it's such a long game it ends up wasting so much of your time talking to a random npc about how they've been wronged so go kill a bunch of dudes. I don't know how anyone plays the game without wanting to skip everything they can. Other people have talked about how it's just a boring revenge plot. It is but what makes this worse is all the characters are so boring and dont have any interesting perspectives or character traits. Whole things feels undercooked, which is weird because there is so much writing in the game. They clearly spent alot of time on this.
Closing thoughts:
The game is really pretty and clearly a lot of time and effort went into it but it's amazing how under cooked and tired it's design is. I had similar issues with it's predecessor ghost of tsushima but it seems exaggerated in yotei. It's just not fun and a chore to play, but again really pretty to look at.