It would be hilarious to see Mama Murphy in my red-paint, flame decal power armor throwing death on raiders.
Settelements definitely have some weirdness in them. In my case, Sanctuary stopped receiving new people and stopped at 7 for many hours. I even setup another beacon to see if the effects stack.
I have beds, food and water to support 14+ people, around 35 defence. No one wants to be my slave friend.
I've setup a supply link to the farm-settlement nearby to see if I can put a beacon there and if people will spawn in it.
I'm 1 level from building shops, it will be really sad if it doesn't work anymore. I'll have to build other settlements, recruit people there, and move them all to Sanctuary.
I also like how some locations are "secret settlements" (only if you're blind, like I sometimes am), which enables you to scrap a good amount of stuff. Some really neat locations, too.
And about the reviews.. well, while people rate the game 2/10 and rage on for obvious stuff, I'm looking forward to fixes, improvements and mods. Most of us already knew what we would get. This sounds incredibly stupid to me: the game is fun, I only experienced very few bugs in almost 20 hours of gameplay, and WHAT THE FUCK WHERE DID THAT RADSCORPION CAME FROM? ...Yep, everything is as good as I wanted.
I don't like the linearity of dialogs, but I prefer it much better than the old camera-lock-big-menu. And I don't feel like I'm missing any info when talking, either.
The only thing that's really bad and should be improved are the settlement placement controls. They need to put some modifier keys that lets you rotate faster, rotate to right angles, etc. Setting a perimeter around Sanctuary was a masochist experience. Build buildings is also annoying because you have to rotate it perfectly, otherwise it'll expand on the wrong direction.
And did anyone bump into an assassin-bot that's rather ninja and fires an epic laser through his eye? I had very little HP, was on power armor, didn't even see him and he murdered me. Then I couldn't find him after I reloaded. Had a skull on its name, roaming around. Looked pretty cool.
EDIT: Someone said they haven't seen raiders attacking settlements. I only saw they attack a place that didn't had the proper defence score.
They didn't attack Sanctuary in my game yet, either because it's bugged or because I keep the defence score twice higher than necessary.