The game is meant to be dark. Failing in combat/quests is meant to be brutal. In my experience, playing to try to avoid the sex content and dark shit actually removes most of it.
I don't mind a game like this where everything isn't sunshine and rainbows and harem town for once. The gameplay is good enough even without the H content. Still needs a ton of work of course, but it's improving. If all the other weapon types can be brought up to the level of how strong/entertaining the stealth/ambush type gameplay is, we should be good.
Melee needs some help with hitboxes, maybe enemy attack speed, the guard ability could probably be quicker after your melee attacks. Right now it feels like there's a delay between the end of your attack and your ability to guard. With how fast the enemy attack speed is, this will fuck you hard. Sword + Shield combat feels the worst to me out of all the options with the way combat works in this game. Your stamina also drains super fast even while blocking in melee and I find myself on the floor real quick trying to tank anything.
Ranged (physical) and magic need some way to deal with constantly being dropped in the middle of hordes of enemies and being unable to attack due to stunlock. Usually the range bonus of ranged/magic damage is worthless in this game. Do less damage than stealth/melee, most encounters force you into melee/close range with ambushes anyways, bleh. Honestly, really none of the combat methods handle the ambushes well. Even melee that should be good at it is overwhelmed too easily by stunlocks/absurd enemy attack speed, and enemies jumping around and such.
Magic definitely needs damage buffs, even going full into Wis it doesn't stand up to other damage types and leaves you desperately lacking in utility/speed that physical damage is allowed. I can spread points evenly among all stats and deal better physical damage than a full wis build magician atm. The range bonus of magic only does so much when enemies will often encircle you with no way for you to avoid those encounters. Even the best counter magic to being surrounded doesn't have enough stun to really help. It takes so long to recover from casting the offhand frost aoe that the stunned enemies will immediately move back into place before you can act. Magic is also shit at running away. Between the timid personalty speed penalty and the inability to spend points into anything but wisdom, you'll move like a snail. This is an issue even before you factor in any injuries that slow speed. Goodluck escaping anything with those.
The ambush mechanic throws ranged completely under a bus and all you can do is flee from those types of encounters, at least until the enemies stop following you. Some maps are designed in a way that you can't escape quickly from them like the marsh areas or the alleyway city maps. In the forest/road maps it's not too bad, but a lot of other areas it's like instant death to be ambushed. Could make it so you start a distance from enemies and you're not allowed to leave the map for 10 seconds or something. More of a survival thing than just "You're gunna get surrounded and stunlocked to death" thing. I have a hard time believing half a dozen dudes could sneak into melee range of somebody and completely surrounded them without them noticing, lol. It could also be more like "You're going to have to kill some of these dudes to be able to reach the edge of the map/leave". Have them start at the edges of the map and block exits like when you trip an alarm during stealth missions.
There's also a bug? where even if you manage to flee from an ambush, you'll immediately get ambushed again too. So they're almost always unavoidable atm.
Stealth gameplay is actually really good though in my experience. I haven't used it as much but it's surprisingly awesome so far. That's often the thing games have trouble with and it's probably the "strongest" and most complete feeling out of all the combat options atm. Don't have to worry about crazy attack speed of enemies if you bonk them to death from behind before they can act. Good reward/punishment system for it. You can potentially get fucking wrecked if you move poorly or you can 1-2 shot dudes. It feels really satisfying. I hope the other combat options will feel as viable/rewarding for skilled play as this.
Traps are also a bit obnoxious to use repeatedly since you'll have to keep reequipping rocks or wood or whatever into the equip slot whenever you run out. They're pretty fun to use though. They're balanced fairly well damage/weight wise when you factor in their ability to slow/cripple enemies. I don't mind them not really being meant to be a main damage source. They're enough support to make up for it. I just hope I won't have to keep going into the menu every time I want to use these abilities.
We also have the allies/npcs jumping in front of your attacks like they're trying to kill themselves... That makes escorting npcs and using allies a pain in the ass.
There's also a bug where attacks will just straight up miss and/or not deal damage. This happens a lot with the offhand frost aoe when you're surrounded by enemies. The attack will go off but nothing will take damage. I figure this is probably known and it's not super common so I haven't really mentioned it before. Some other balance shit probably takes priority. When it usually fucks you is when you'd already be fucked by the other issues basically, lol.