You don't have iframes on your dodge so that's where I feel most people are screwing up and calling the combat janky. The parry window is incredibly forgiving and you do a ton of damage if you follow up with a heavy attack. You can also charge up your heavy and still move around which is a nice touch. Get to the back of the heavy grunt enemies and go to work. You do crit damage more often I believe.
You also have other tools, lots of tools actually. You can switch from melee to bow almost instantly. Firebombs, poison darts, sleep darts, etc. Tame an animal and use it as a distraction.
The lock-on could use some tightening up and the camera can screw things up for you in a crowded room but that's been a problem for just about every third person melee game ever.
Nah, SoW is better. Horizon Dawn is better. Yakuza 0 is better.
SoW and HZD can't even sniff AC:O's embalming fluid drenched loin cloth. And I love SoW for the Nemesis system but the actual world design, dialogue, and main story missions are dogshit.
HZD gets that console exclusive bump of love from everyone, just like Uncharted games (
dreadful gunplay outside of Uncharted 2's multiplayer until they fucked it up), despite it copying nearly everything from every open world game and not doing anything better besides the robodinos being somewhat interesting. The writing is horrible and the quests are very, very uninspired. Yakuza games rule though.