I like it alot, it's very fun. The seikret bird mounts are as good as the dogs in Rise, if not better. Dual weapons is nice quality-of-life, I like that glowflies came back from World but without having to scrape fluids or read footprints anymore. I like that Hot & Cool Drinks are effectively gone from the series, and paintballing isn't required. I don't really mind that the game feels easier, I'd rather win than lose, and really the "winning" is in the second-to-second gameplay of getting hit or not. Eating a few hits shouldn't ruin my whole run, and re-running it I'm already motivated to do better than my last attempt if it was sloppy. I'm sure people will philosophically disagree but I'm over the arguments about just how punishing a game has to be.
My biggest complaint is just how incredibly dogshit and japanese the multiplayer is. Solo is fine. If you want to try playing with randos with SOS Flare, or want to answer SOS flares, fine. If you want to play with your friends? What an absolute disaster. The menus are complete ass and everything is given a new and/or vague name to obfuscate the process. It took entirely too long, at least 3 hours, of trial and error to effectively play with my friends, who all have varying amateur or professional IT or engineering experience. There's a variety of lobby categories, there's a crossplay-enabled friend list, there's squads. But it's all poorly explained and hard to actually accept/invite/navigate and really unclear what you're doing or when you'll see people. Everything revolves around a Member List, the lobbies are useless, and you basically can't rely on seeing anyone outside of a direct quest encounter with a big monster. You can't count on a friend knowing to join your Quest(already in progress!) unless you're already in voice chat trying to coordinate this multiplayer jank, and probably will have to explain whether it's Lobby Quests or Linked depending on how closely you're organized, and you effectively immediately phase out taking one step out of town, or in the open world as soon as the quest rewards are doled out from an Expedition/Field open quest. Are you the wrong HR rank or just not far enough in the campaign? EAT SHIT, guess you can only fight Chatacabras and chickens, haha. It's a fucking mess compared to older games, Rise and World were much cleaner on these fronts. If you like a rando you played with, there's almost no way to actually start chatting about similar interests or even communicate with them easily to make a friendship that could ever extend outside of the Wilds game. It's a real mess. The actual gameplay is fun, that saves it.
