Not good from the jump, per se. It was a good
idea, but it became brutal to play because they were basically working an Early Access title as release.
You'd effectively lose progress doing the main quests unless you saw them through. Each one of those Tall Tales is hours of time and you had NO checkpoint system. If you left 90% of the way there, you had to do it all over again. You got very little for completing stuff. And that completing stuff was in of itself lacking, so you'd run around and continue to redo the small quests over and over, making it painfully monotonous.
IDK how long reviewers played it for, but if you're passing by you can say "gee this is fun" but any serious time dedication the game back then would show the shallow depth. I played in the "limbo" era, which was just Xbox+Windows Store users and additional over-time content, and even then it wasn't all there yet.
I like the game and more people SHOULD play it, but to act as if it was always good is doing a disservice to Rare for picking their pants up and putting meat on the skeleton. It got better way before it reached PS. It's been in a better state for some time, but it took longer to get to that state to begin with.