Aye, i think it was the only way to play, in the beginning. Now you can jump directly to just doing the …eh, missions I guess they call them?
Okay, the campaign didn’t start out that strong I think (The whole demo that was released was part of it) but afterwards I really enjoyed it, personally - but I really disliked the starting bits. It felt like a game where you just had to press specific buttons at specific times, but that changed after we got to Kamala :-)