I just picked this book up from a used bookstore, but I'm not sure if I'm ever going to attempt to actually play it...

Pretty much. Rifts has always been a setting with sweet lore and shit rules.

the rules for things other than combat is shit
the game is decent if you just use the rules for killing and no dice role play everything else

Even the combat rules are contradictory bullshit, though. How many attacks do you have without a hand-to-hand skill? Do the hand-to-hand attacks stack with those base attacks or replace them. The rules have said literally four different things in different books. That's just the start too.

you go with ultimate edition or game masters guide
no hand to hand gives you 1 action to use for combat in a melee round at 1st level
all the others with a skill start with 4, except assassin which gets 3, at 1st
not going to bother looking at the H2H skills from Japan/China to see if they deviate from that
you can get another attack if you take the boxing skill
many races and a few classes can give extra actions as well

So again: contradictory and complicated rules, spread over many books. Even if you go with commonly accepted interpretations of rules, you have rounds that take forever to complete, attrition-based combat where you have to be MDC or you don't matter, catalogs of guns that are 90% the same except for the handful that are ridiculously broken, and the list just goes on and on. Savage Worlds is going to be a much better option for running a game in Rifts than the Palladium system ever was.

>contradictory and complicated rules
there are just combat rules and skill rules
different hand to hand choices give you different amounts of actions
how is that any more complicated then seeing how many attacks a wizard, cleric, or fighter can make?
once you get past the number of attacks, which you are having difficulty with for some reason, the actual rules for combat have been copy+paste from the first printing
i will agree the combat can/will get bogged down when there are multiple individuals fighting
its much faster/simpler when its party vs solo
again, though, may systems have the exact same issue with combat
attrition-based combat can be mitigated with the right choice of spells
can't get around MDC really unless you have hundreds of SDC and can regenerate. so, you get this one
finally, going through all the supplements for gear and classes is appealing to Rift players
if you don't just play human, select a class from the 'core', get basic 100 MDC armor and a laser that does 6d6 mdc

Great setting, meh mechanics.

I'm currently doing a campaign in that setting. After a few weeks my DM threw out the system just swapped to d20. The setting is cool as fuck. You want to get Coalition War Campaign and or Rifts Mercenaries.

>the game is decent if you just use the rules for killing and no dice role play everything else
But combat is its biggest problem. Most classes (including many combat focused ones) feel useless in combat next to a Glitter Boy or other high tier class.

Shimbeba addressed this
a Glitter Boy is mobile artillery; treat it as such
everyone is going to target it first
it can't cope with more than 1 target at a time really
it can't deploy itself fast between firing

the gm can limit what classes and gear is accessible