Huge improvement on Dead Island.
Compared to it's predecessors, the storyline is less daft, with no fetch quests for stupid things and stupid motivations that would never happen in a disaster situation.
Being able to actually traverse the city and not fight zombies if you choose is the biggest step up, obviously to facilitate the free running, but it makes a change from endless fight after fight after fight compared to the Dead Island games, which just started to drag.
Still too many weapons on offer. Seriously, unless you are REALLY bad at games, in which case you'll never finish it anyway, you will probably use all of 10 total weapons in the game, aside from the guns, which themselves you will only use 4 or 5 (I found one rifle that seemed to be a lot more powerful than any other in the game [for seemingly no reason], and then all other guns have exactly the same stats as their counterparts, except Rai's pistol, which is a lot more powerful than other pistols and does burst fire). Once you work out what you're doing with the upgrades, decent weapons will last a good length of time, and you only tend to upgrade to a completely different weapon once in a while. Not a fault all of it's own though, plagued the previous games and is also something Borderlands is guilty of. Most of the time, most of the weapons you find just take up inventory space and end up getting sold.
Loads to do, plenty of side quests. An antagonist you really want to kill at the end too, but the protagonist you play as is a little dumb to fall for constant tricks and traps. That can be a little frustrating, in that horror movie "you know he's behind the door" kind of way. Still, as said, you really want to see the bad guy get his by the game's climax.
Control scheme is still not perfect though. For combat it works fine, but in a game so geared towards free running it is THAT mechanic that falls down, excuse the pun. It seems to be quite arbitrary at times whether you need to double press the jump/grab button, or press and hold, or just press once. Also, clicking the left thumb stick in to sprint is a mistake in control scheme development. Often, you are not sure if you are still sprinting, as sometimes bumping into stuff stops you, and other times it doesn't, so sometimes you think you are still going and nope, now I'm being chomped/timer is running out, or you think you aren't, click it in, and stop yourself running instead, and now you're being chomped/your timer is running out. It should have taken a cue from Assassin's Creed and had a button you just hold down while you free run to make it a much more fluid, enjoyable experience.
Still, good game, and vastly superior to the grind of Dead Island, just not perfect. Would recommend.