As others wrote, this isn't really a looter shooter - all the critical equipment in the game, like weapons and armors and so on, are handcrafted. Consumables and resources are distributed randomly (or can be purchased at vendors) but everything else is either found in preset locations in the world, received as quest rewards, purchased, or crafted from boss parts (which, to my knowledge, are not designed to be repeated ad infinitum to luck out on a loot table - instead each boss drops a resource that you can then choose to combine with a bunch of moneys to turn into a special item.) As far as I know (being only 8 hours into the game), the replayability comes from the fact that major sections of the levels and even some bosses are randomly rolled for every playthrough.
This game doesn't play anything like a looter shooter either if my experience with Warframe, Borderlands, and Shit Warrior 2: Every Shoota is Better with Loota btw is anything to go by. Instead of every enemy being piss-easy to kill and your only real sense of progression coming from how quickly and efficiently you can clear levels to get them incremental rewards, here the pace is much more slow and dare I say somewhat tactical. I'm playing solo on the Hard difficulty and thus far I found that the overworld levels provide dynamic firefights with roaming enemies which, while for the most part very manageable, are very capable of catching you off guard and sending you to the nearest checkpoint - a couple of hits from a strong enemy or a few seconds of sustained fire is all that it takes for my lightly-armored hunter to bite the dust. On the other hand, the dungeons and setpiece fights is when shit gets really engaging. My view of the game grew from "ech, its a decent way to break up my twelve-hour edging marathon while listening to erotic ASMR and VODs of twitch streamers debating politics" to "NOT BAD obama face dot gif" when a miniboss fucking ambushed me in the middle of a dungeon run, teleporting around the place and harassing me with fire as well as summoning a pack of shitter mobs to tarpit me as well as a discount Pyramid Head - looking motherfucker who shambled towards me from the direction I would naturally flee to. I found myself rewarded for having stocked up with consumables as I desperately scrambled to inject myself with adrenaline to gain speed and distance away from the enemy horde, used bandages to prevent myself from bleeding out from a single stroke of the bad boy's blade, and mashed the hotkey to the ammo replenishment item when I was caught out with no ammo in my primary weapon as the aforementioned wall of rape shambled towards me (every consumable plays a small animation so you actually need time and space to use them - small thing but adds additional considerations to every combat encounter). Since that early encounter I have ran into several others, both scripted and dynamically generated ones, that demanded a similar or greater level of resource management and tactics. For a defensive scenario later in the game I had to adjust my loadout and completely change up my approach after multiple failed attempts - instead of making the stand near the objectively and inevitably getting overwhelmed I slotted one of my guns with a weapon mod I crafted from a boss that shot an aggro-drawing spore companion buddy friend and learned to dance frantically around the arena to draw enemies away from the objective while also preventing myself from getting cornered. Good, sphincter-tightening fun.
These things aren't unheard of in ARPGs, of course, but that is my point - this isn't an incremental loota shoota but something much more similar to a 3rd person ARPG.
Peripheral stuff: Gunplay feels good to be, weapons sound punchy and barring bosses most enemies go down in a few hits (as I mentioned before, so does the PC.) Can't speak for build variety yet but I am certainly utilizing aspects of my build heavily - as a hunter I try to stay out of enemy aggro range, take them out one by one and from afar, use my special ability for increased critical hit damage and combat awareness - just going by the equipment and abilities the other characters get it seems like you would have a noticeably different experience with them. Story didn't particularly grab me but so far I found a few interesting bits of dank lore and narrative turns, but even if you don't share my charitable view it is easy enough to just skip through, Was very pleasantly surprised by the variety of hidden secrets in the handcrafted portions of levels, which usually require some sort of item interaction to unlock a hidden trait or item or dialogue.
This game didn't blow my mind but it was certainly more than I expected and IMO a step above the usual white noise I require to fill every second of my day with.
