What is this game's deal? Really weird stuff. I'm 15-20 hours in and there are parts of it I enjoy very much and parts of that are so out of date and baffling. Unorganized bulleted list of my thoughts:

• The bike is really well done. IMO, traversal might be the most important element to make an open world work, and the it's always fun to hop on and ride around - much more than the horses in most other games. Not only is it fun to ride, but the fact that you can't summon it to yourself and it acts as a way to carry more supplies makes it feel like your lifeline you always need to keep track of, managing where it is, its condition, gas level. You can't even save the game away from your bike. It's very well integrated and maybe the best thing about the game.

• The game has constant weird cuts to tiny cutscenes for little snippets of dialogue, and you spend so much time following someone at a walking pace and exchanging dialogue. This feels so clunky and out of date, because in these moments your actions are so limited, and it rarely seems necessary.

• The hordes of zombies are enormous and exciting to fight. You need to have a plan, lots of supplies, and time to take out hundreds (literally hundreds) at a single time. They are the game's real boss battles and they rule. The zombies as a whole are interesting, with daily schedules and behavior.

• There are child zombies that you can beat to death with a nailed bat.

• The player character is a depressed white dude in a biker gang named Deacon St. John. He's the epitome of a gamer protagonist stereotype and that was super off putting for me at first. Yet... I actually love his character? He's a total lunatic, in exactly the way someone who spent two years biking around the apocalypse killing zombies would be. He rants to himself, can't regulate his speaking volume, rambles about how much he wants to kill bad guys, and overall feels very Mad Max. His actor does a very, very good job with him.

• The dialogue, voice acting, and facial animation are excellent, even if the subject matter is not at all new or creative. The story is... very loose, so far.

• The story is not truly non-linear, but you have a lot of agency in what order to approach it. I appreciate that.

• Some missions are extremely restrictive in what they allow. The worst example of this is an early game boss fight against a bear. You're sneaking a girl out of a town filled with zombies, and a bear shows up. The game forces you to kill the bear. Why? It literally wandered away from me into the woods, and I could have easily hopped on my bike and ridden away. It would have never bothered me. But I had to kill the bear. So I climbed up on a gas station and shot three magazines' worth of AK ammo into it. It sucked, and at this point I quit the game and did not come back for almost two years. Awful, absolute shit, terrible. I hate when open world games make bears and wolves marauding monsters with unquenchable bloodlust that must be destroyed.

• Fights against human encampments are very basic and uninteresting unless you can attract a horde of zombies.

• The open world design is pretty simple - there's no Ubisoft towers or checklist of activities. Every single thing you can do besides fighting hordes is a story mission of some sort with its own dialogue and cutscenes. It never feels like filler.

• I question the necessity of crafting systems. Thematically appropriate and it doesn't ever quite get in the way, but I don't think it adds much, either. I do like attaching a sawblade to a baseball bat, though.

Anyone played this? I'm not done yet, and I am enjoying it, but I don't know if it's going to be something I look back on fondly or if I will go all the way through. It's supposed to be pretty long.