Have managed to get about 8 hours in by now just exploring, following leads/doing quests and axe-murdering my way across rural England. One really fucking weird bug (I at least hope it is) is that enemies can respawn upon reloading a save. As in, the area you just cleared becomes (at least partially) repopulated if you save, shut the game down and reload. I found this out the hard way when I was attacking a rather large enemy camp. They also respawn if you leave an area, meaning if you enter a building, clear it and come back out, you'll still have a fight on your hands unless you leg it outta there.
The lack of a dodge/block isn't quite as big of a pain as I'd expected it might be. You can essentially dodge by just manually sidestepping away from melee attacks, and kicks can serve the same purpose. In fact, on the default difficulty, a kick and heavy attack from the axe kills practically everything that I'm currently fighting. (That method worked best against the faction with fewer guns, though.)
Status effects like Bleed end up being pretty much an insta-kill for the player, because by the time the effect triggers (at least for me), I've already taken so much damage that I haven't got a chance in hell to go into my inventory and use a bandage. As far as I can tell, you can't set bandages to quick actions.
The torch (flashlight) ends up being pretty pointless in and of itself, since I haven't yet found any areas where it's so dark that it's needed. BUT, it has a really useful secondary function in that all nearby items that you move the torch over flash white. Good to pick up on items and ingredients that are a little bit more out of the way.
It's pretty neat overall, I'm really enjoying the exploring. The RPG part of the game is pretty lacklustre as far as skills and builds go, but you've got free reign over how to approach quests. You can either go out of your way to resolve them, do it quick and easy to benefit you, or just murder the quest-giver and take the item you want. I've spotted more niggers since the start, but all of them have been mindless NPCs. The number of women "bigshots" currently outnumber the male ones by one, however none of them is your typical sassy, Mary Sue girlboss. One of them is definitely going to murder me if I go with her quest route, but at least she's trying to be sneaky and underhanded about it, as a woman would be rather than fisting me to death.