First impressed as requested.
The graphics and animations are good. There's nothing thus far that has massively impressed me, but frankly, that's simply a result of us being spoiled by graphical masterpieces such as Horizon: Zero Dawn (except the facial animations which were just weird) and Uncharted 4, and so should not be taken as criticism for the game. The art direction for the enemies is pretty great thus far. I also want to give a big thumbs up to the audio, which makes your axe strikes feel really powerful. I especially love the sound effect played when you recall the axe to your hand after having tossed it. It just feels right.
Gameplay wise, it takes a surprisingly long time for your attack abilities to open up. Once you start unlocking stuff, the fights become a lot more dynamic, and you'll be kicking ass and looking good doing so. So far, the bosses have been rather simplistic. They play okay, but given how Soulsborn like the game feels on the harder difficulty, I'm kind of disappointed with how limited the movesets for the bosses are. Then again, I've only fought three of them thus far, so things might change. I'm definitely liking the standard enemy encounters.
And let's talk about that difficulty. I started the game on hard, the 2nd hardest difficulty, partially because I wanted a challenge, and partially because I figured there would be a trophy tied to it. First off, there are no trophies tied to difficulty, so any fellow trophy hunters can rest at ease knowing that the hardest difficulty, which is supposedly insane, isn't mandatory for the Platinum. Second, while the hard difficulty makes the standard enemy encounters feel very Soulsborn like, in the sense that you really can't survive a lot of hit and have to constantly be on your guard, it makes certain special enemies absolutely awful to fight against. One type of enemy simply kills you outright in one hit, regardless of your health or if you're blocking. Add a large health pool and super armor that makes it nearly impossible to stagger him, and you're left with what can only be called horrible game design. There's only one way to fight these guys. bait one of their two attacks, and then get in a single hit before retreating to a safe distance. Keep doing this 20 plus times, until they die. It's just not fun to play a game like this, and so when I died while fighting two of same at the same time, just one hit away from killing one of them, and having brought the other one down to half health, I decided to lower the difficulty one notch, They're not hard to fight. Their attacks are clearly telegraphed and slow. But the amount of time it takes to bring them down, combined with how painfully boring it is to fight them, just sucks all the fun out of the game.
As for puzzles, I haven't encountered that many, and those I have encountered have been easy to the point of not having much reason for existing. Fine with me though, as I mostly never cared for puzzles in videogames.
On a final note. Kratos is a lot more interesting this time around. It's too early to tell if the story is good, but thus far, I'm liking the direction they've taken with his character.