Well using a combination of me being stupid and pre ordering this game cause it was on discount and unemployment so I have lots of time to kill, I was able to sink about 8 hours into it.
First impression, its not bad. It's kinda like SE attempt at making a horizon dawn type of open world game. The world is massive and there's a lot to find in it, and most of it is thankfully not marked on the map, only the big landmark are. Sadly the loot is really boring, its mostly just crafting mats to give yourself small bonus. Traversing the world is nice because the movement is pretty fluid (although annoyingly enough you have to keep holding down the run button the entire time). The world colour pallet is kinda on the bleak/beige side so its not that good looking sadly, even though it has plenty of nice vista and location. Although the architecture and cloths is pretty nice, sorta victorian style (kinda like deus ex human revolution).
Optimization is god awful, I'm playing on a 6650 XT, which is pretty recent and supposedly equivalent to nvidia 3060 or so. Yet the game on medium graphic stutter a lot and has a hard time keeping 60 FPS. And it's not like the game is amazingly details, the graphic are good but not the most impressive ever.
Character is really where the game stumble bad, the main character is just an obnoxious ***** who's just rude to everyone because...? In great boon to representation she's a black women! So of course the literal first two things we learn about her is that she's a petty criminal and her parent abandoned her... The game start with a fairly well done sequence in new york, except it last like 5 minutes, in typical SE fashion they must have wasted months making all these asset which ultimately serves no purpose. The game would have flat out been better if it just stared a no voice custom character that was just generated in fantasy land, they'd have saved a tons of man hours too.
The entire game the main character talks to her magical wristband and he's actually kinda fun, which just makes it annoying that she's an asshole to him the entire time even when all he does is help her. Also he can't interact with anyone outside of her, so he can't even take over from the protag during cutscene.
The story is standard "the world is doomed, do X to save it", except the ***** of a main character always refuse and instead does it for revenge (which feel flat for me cause I was cheering when the character that send her down the revenge path gets killed). But the world building is nice, this isn't just standard tolkien-esque fantasy world, its maybe a bit closer to something like nier automata in some ways.
Combat is pretty good, there's a tons of spell and the skill tree actually opens up a bunch more which is nice since its not tiny bonus. You can also take tasks for every magic you have which gives you small stat buff once completed, so it gives you a reason to use a large variety of spell as you play trough the game rather than stick to the same one the entire game. Overall its pretty fluid, despite the so so control. Magic are big and flashy and pulling off the big screen wipe attack is nice. Playing on hard the challenge is good, although there's a couple of high level enemy in low level area that I wasted a lot of time trying to kill.
Overall it just feel like really good game trapped in a pretty mediocre one, and the sad part is that just making the good game would have required a lot less work for the dev.