Early on it has a really good, adventuresome feel. I found the mountains and the Plains a little grindy, it has to do with how much of the ores/black metal you need to collect. IMO, of course.

I find I enjoy the building and roaming around to be fun/my main enjoyment. The combat is solid, its biggest drawback is the lack of variability. Bosses are fun, but more for how they look and epic feel, than the difficulty. They crush trees and wreck boulders as you fight them, the fights have a good feel. Same goes for 'sub bosses' like trolls, golems, etc.

That said, this could feel grindy to some. Like some of stuff takes up time that is somewhat bland time, like gathering more items from past biomes, I don't mind it but that and some other stuff could definitely be considered a time waster by some. But, you can console command as much as you want so you can skip anything you don't like. Game is alpha so it is fun but you can tell that it needs more of a variety of things.