I have very mixed feeling with this game.
I played it for 17 hours and loved almost every second of it.
The pixel art is beautiful, the soundtrack is amazing, the controls feel really good, and the boss fights are great. The story was honestly pretty appealing and well narrated. It also has a very nice touch of humor at some points, with Death making fun of you when you die, and some characters having funny dialoges.
The regular enemy combat is ok, but It ended up feeling kind of boring at some points. I guess there's a limit to how interesting you can make 2D combat and not every game can be Hollow Knight.
I guess a lot of people will complain that you get fast travel too late, and yes, you get too late, but I still think that's better than getting it right away and missing out on a lot of exploration. Still, they should give it to you a bit earlier imo.
The menus are pretty terrible. The way you equip and unequip stuff is kind of meh, and the fact that you can't use consumable from the manu sucks. Instead you have to equip them to your quick bar and use them that way. The map is also really bad. It works, but it could be a lot better.
So, everything was pretty great, I was enjoying my playthrough a lot, until I reached what I can only guess is the end of the game.
I was feeling like I was a bit underpowered for the Endless fight, so I went back and challenged some of the juiced up versions of the bosses I had defeated (I think they're called heroics?) and holy shit was I disappointed.
I still wonder -with all due respect to the devs- how can you turn something so good into something so obnoxious and unfun?
I LOVED almost all the boss fights in this game. They were by far the best part of it for me. They felt really good, well balanced, interesting, punishing but not too pushed... The heroic versions were the complete opposite: they basically gave the bosses a bunch of adds, projectiles and/or AoE abilities, which combined with the insane upscale in health and damage they get, basically turns all the fights into DPS races, because you can't just play careful, avoid attacks and get damage in when you can, because it's basically impossible to avoid all the crap that's going on.
After this experience I could've just gone back to Endless and finish the base game ignoring the heroic fights, but I felt so bad and frustrated I just dropped the game altogether. I'll probably go back and finish it at some point.
This doesn't take away from how great the game had been up until that point tho, so I'm still giving it a good rating, but I'm still really disappointed with the direction they took when designing these endgame optional fights.
I played it for 17 hours and loved almost every second of it.
The pixel art is beautiful, the soundtrack is amazing, the controls feel really good, and the boss fights are great. The story was honestly pretty appealing and well narrated. It also has a very nice touch of humor at some points, with Death making fun of you when you die, and some characters having funny dialoges.
The regular enemy combat is ok, but It ended up feeling kind of boring at some points. I guess there's a limit to how interesting you can make 2D combat and not every game can be Hollow Knight.
I guess a lot of people will complain that you get fast travel too late, and yes, you get too late, but I still think that's better than getting it right away and missing out on a lot of exploration. Still, they should give it to you a bit earlier imo.
The menus are pretty terrible. The way you equip and unequip stuff is kind of meh, and the fact that you can't use consumable from the manu sucks. Instead you have to equip them to your quick bar and use them that way. The map is also really bad. It works, but it could be a lot better.
So, everything was pretty great, I was enjoying my playthrough a lot, until I reached what I can only guess is the end of the game.
I was feeling like I was a bit underpowered for the Endless fight, so I went back and challenged some of the juiced up versions of the bosses I had defeated (I think they're called heroics?) and holy shit was I disappointed.
I still wonder -with all due respect to the devs- how can you turn something so good into something so obnoxious and unfun?
I LOVED almost all the boss fights in this game. They were by far the best part of it for me. They felt really good, well balanced, interesting, punishing but not too pushed... The heroic versions were the complete opposite: they basically gave the bosses a bunch of adds, projectiles and/or AoE abilities, which combined with the insane upscale in health and damage they get, basically turns all the fights into DPS races, because you can't just play careful, avoid attacks and get damage in when you can, because it's basically impossible to avoid all the crap that's going on.
After this experience I could've just gone back to Endless and finish the base game ignoring the heroic fights, but I felt so bad and frustrated I just dropped the game altogether. I'll probably go back and finish it at some point.
This doesn't take away from how great the game had been up until that point tho, so I'm still giving it a good rating, but I'm still really disappointed with the direction they took when designing these endgame optional fights.