Finished 2/3 endings at the moment but don't particularly feel like jumping right back in a 3rd time so I'll stop here for now.
My opinion on it is not too different from Zechs from a few page back. While I'm happy its a real armored core game and had a blast playing it, I would put it toward the bottom of the franchise. Build variety feel extremely limited for a few reason, chief among them is the staggered mechanic that I consider to be a massive blunder. It really narrow your options, you need something that does a ton of damage in a burst to trigger the stagger without giving enough time to recover, and a ton of weapon just can't do that and so are just useless junk. Also the ricochet system means you need to be right up in the enemy face to do any real damage, which the game clearly knew since there's almost no range option. Being able to fire both shoulders and hand weapons at once is great in theory, but when combined with stagger means you want to have them all fire at the same time as much as possible, which further reduce your build choices.
On top of that the game takes way too long to give you gear choice, its cool that they kept parts for NG+ and NG++, but it doesn't justify starting with an incredibly bare selection. Older game would front load original weapon/parts, and toward the end of the game (or NG+) would start giving you re-skin of parts with altered stats, which would have been much preferable to starting with something like 4 choices for some pieces.
Story wise AC game were never really good, but previously you were just a nameless mercenary, which meant you could make up your own reason for why your going along with the plot, and the game often had character question the MC on there motivation. But here we're some kind of zombie controlled by Walter or something which makes it needlessly unclear how much agency we even have. I also don't really get the story and there's often informations that seem to contradict each others. This works in a soul game where item description double as lore dumb and you can tell a lot of the story trough environment, but there's nothing like that here so its just confusing for its own sake.
I do really like some QoL changes, being able to test the AC and quickly change piece on the fly is amazing and if they make a sequel with good build variety it would be incredibly useful. Having a little movie for every weapon is also really great. Restarting on checkpoint is also nice since it means you don't end up having to redo large section of every missions, although I don't think they should have rested your health/ammo. Another annoyance is not getting ranked when you play mission trough the campaign, I probably already S ranked most of them on the second playtrough but I would still need to replay them again to actually get it.