I picked this up mid-June and went through it over a couple weeks. I liked it a lot! I agree with most of what's been said - the area design is fantastic and the way each area and situation changes over times of day is very cool, setting stuff up for later in a day is a neat system, etc. I had a few minor issues with the balance of when to do certain things. e.g. I had three-four different things I needed to set up in morning at different locations, but then noon and afternoon were basically empty except for following that stuff up, and evening was "welp I guess I'll do another Aleksis run for the hell of it" or skip.
I did really enjoy the variety of "builds" available - with the combinations of personal trinkets, guns + gun abilities + gun trinkets, and slabs + slab upgrades, you had a ton of flexibility. It'd let you do crazy dual-wield builds, berserker melee builds, invisible super-stealth builds, hacking-master builds... It was a lot of fun to mess around with the different stuff when I needed to shake things up.
Usually, though, I stuck to a pretty comfortable all-around build: Higher HP and max power, faster power regen, and reduced damage taken. A suppressed LIMP-10 with range and accuracy tokens was my go-to for any and every mission; it's as good a sniper rifle as the actual sniper rifle ever was, and silent to boot, plus you can't get caught with your pants down since it's automatic. I'd also keep a shotgun onhand for when things got messy, esp. one of the automatic double-barreled ones, and then I'd play around with whatever else the mission or my mood might want in the third slot; I enjoyed playing around with the unique weapons but honestly found them all pretty superfluous. Definitely powerful, and they're fun with unique tricks, but ultimately not particularly better than an assortment of the regular purple weapons.
I leaned heavily on the Aether trinket for stealth and the upgrade that didn't drain power when you stood still. I rotated the other slot but usually kept Shift not only for transport but because of all the alternate routes and such it opened up. Karnesis wasn't great but it was fun to play around with and helped to clear crowds if I got caught and cornered; the damage/armor one was good when I wanted to go berserker mode (With the power regen upgrade on that slab, damage reduction and health trinkets, and a health-recovery SMG, you're essentially invincible until a lull in the action loses you your power charge); linking enemies was fun for keeping things moving quickly by clearing out a lot of enemies at once.
But that basic build countered pretty much anything they could throw at me, and felt a bit stronger and safer than most of the specialized ones, to boot. I used some of the settings to make the game a bit easier because I mentally can't handle a lot of difficulty in games right now. Not much; I just turned on "tag everyone in sight" option instead of doing it 1-by-1, half because of the advantages but half because trying to tag individuals one at a time was getting to be a pain in the ass and it kept things moving faster. I also turned off the scaling difficulty that made loops harder later on. It did get a bit too easy by the end, but not quite enough to fully regret it (in particular, after a certain number of loops, getting through a stage to kill the visionary again just because I needed another slab trinket was a bit tiring). I might go back and play on normal later, especially since I have a pretty thorough gasp of the layouts and systems now, but I'm also in no rush; I feel like I finished it and I'm happy to leave it at that.
