Okay, so managed to make it in yesterday after a long time in the queue (don't know how long exactly as afking). No longer getting stuck in loading screens, which is nice.
Are attack combos direction-locked and lengthy like Monster Hunter?
For hammer at least, not absolutely direction locked, but you can't just spin freely either that I've noticed. Combos tend to be chains of maybe 5, but I believe both sword and chainblades have a combo with a sustained attack in, and for hammer I've not come across many openings where I could squeeze more than 1 hammer combo.
First (early) impressions are that it's a somewhat more simplified/accessible monster hunter. There're only a handful of predefined combos for each weapon (though at least for hammer I've found myself using them all, and it's no less varied than what I've actually ended up using in MH in the past) and monsters seem a touch bland (though early game, and no worse than early MH monsters, so probably too early to judge). That said, it's still pretty enjoyable to me at least.
My main concern currently is that all the fight areas seem pretty similar. Whilst the behemoths move between them during the hunt, they don't actually seem to make much difference, and just seem to tax you some time if you don't know the island layout well. Also, the islands are all premade, but still manage to be somewhat bland (I seem to remember procedural generation being mentioned as an eventual goal, but can't find where).
Server issues are still present, albeit reduced. Queues are very slow and sometimes you get stuck on an island after a public hunt and have to wait ~30min for it to default back to main menu to avoid requeueing (haven't seen that in solo). Supposedly as of this morning they've tweaked the queues to be a bit faster but it now doesn't appear to be moving at all, so my recommendation is to intersperse with some netflix
Hopefully they'll crack the issues soon, but we shall see.
Framerate wise, I've encountered no issues on i5 w/ GTX760 so likely not hardware based.
TLDR: It feels like the start of an open beta, but there's some potential. Early game is a bit bland, but at least I'm not spending an hour collecting mushrooms. Server issues currently very painful.
FAKEDIT: Queue started moving just after saying that it wasn't, tho still very slow. Though had an internet stutter and it remembered where in the queue I was, so that was nice.