I'm currently on my first playthrough of the game (I bought it during the recent Steam sale; all the negative reviews put me off buying it earlier). Thus far I'm up to (and fairly well stuck on) the Boat level.
The free running is excellent (bar some annoying niggles at times when you have to do a wall-up-flip-jump-stop in rapid succession, but fortunately those always seem to be in "free" time when not under fire). The story (that I've seen so far) is great, the characters are great, the art is great, the cutscenes are great, the humour is great (particularly the elevator text), the animations (both in and out of combat) are great. But the combat itself sucks. And I would like to overlook that but there's far too freaking much of it.
Perhaps somewhat masochistically, I'm trying to play it without using guns at all (apparently there's an achievement for that on other platforms, but not on PC, so I can't use that as an excuse; I just don't think they fit well with Faith's character). And even on Easy it's really hard to get the timing right to do a disarm. (Maybe I'm just a bit uncoordinated and lack uber skillz, but that's why I'm playing on Easy, dammit!)
As I said, I'm stuck in the Boat level at the moment where I need to take down four well-armed opponents before I can turn a wheel to escape. The wheel turn is slow enough and it's in plain sight, so I can't just run away like I did in the first half of the level. I can take out two opponents easily enough (usually), but inevitably the third or fourth does me in. This is not fun. It's the opposite of fun. This is the sort of thing that I hope they're getting rid of in a sequel.
