Recent reviews by The Grifter

Gameplay is great.
Graphics are great.
General mechanics of the game are fluid and feel good.
Crafting is simplistic and impacts your game in a meaningful way.
The worldbuilding is great, it makes sense but still has that sense of fantasy.
This game's narrative and story is mind-numbing, obnoxious, and flat-out irritating.

The way the game´s story is told is so unbelievably forced that I feel like the victim of a D&D dungeon master forcing me through the story-line of the book they wrote. Of all the games I have played with the "silent protagonist" trope, this is by far the worst. The game does not try to make you feel like you are actually participating in the world, you are just some guy who goes and does things, during which people just constantly monologue at you. That is one of the biggest issues, you are not being talked to, you are being talked at. I feel more like a bartender listening to the ravings of a drunk person who has no semblance of caring who I am than someone who is actually a part of the world.

On top of this poorly executed silent protagonist narrative, the game throws several annoying storytelling clichés at you for no apparent reason, seemingly for the sake of just them being there. The primary violator of this are EXTREMELY forced cutscenes where you are put in danger for literally no reason.
"Oh look at this car that you can see is empty from every angle all of a sudden spawns ghouls out of nowhere and you´re really surprised for some reason and your friend has to save you."
"Oh, you´ve been clowning on this boss but he won´t die for some reason; turns out there was a forced cutscene this whole time and you were wasting your time trying to win."
I could forgive all of those things or at least push past them for the sake of decent, albeit monotone, gameplay. However, at the start of one of the game´s later levels, the game forces you into a part of a level where there is a very obvious, linear path with no option of straying away from it. Seems fine, right? No. Whoever wrote that level felt compelled to have the person with you issue navigation commands for the entire duration.

My experience of this game was enjoyable gameplay that suffered a death by a thousand cuts. This death takes the form of obnoxiously long monologues that feel written for the sole purpose of making you register as many hours in this game as possible than to make you invested in the story. Several forced and obnoxiously tacky cutscenes that feel more like lazy plot twists than a natural continuation of what is actually going on in the game.

4/10, I do not understand the hype for this game whatsoever.

I played this game for somewhere around 200 hours on Bethesda before it came to Steam.
While this game a significant amount of issues, it's come a very long way from what it was. The addition of Npc's with the Wastelander's expansions breathes new life into the game and with the other updates that came before, the amount of quests and things to do has noticeably increased.
Despite the amount of bugs and such, the statements I've seen made about the game being "unplayable" or "pure garbage" are objectively not true.
Even though the game has well over 40 hours worth of content, I would wait for a sale before buying this game.