I feel like I'm watching something die while playing this, there's something uncannily disturbing and also pathetic to it. 2077 is an aesthetically visionless game, a collage of 2012 cyberpunk wallpapers, complete w the thoroughly unexamined orientalism. Mechanically your options are the standard collection of Ubisoft open worldisms, pick up guns that are magically bigger number than the same gun you had an hour ago, pick up a collectable, talk to a guy to go to a base where you can either do shallow stealth or shitty shooting, and sometimes you might get to pick a dialogue option! Plus like every modern AAA game loads and loads of trivial terrible unskippable dialogue. Gave up after the third crash in 12 hours, lmao fuck this game. Remember when they put flashing lights in it that could kill people?

More like Lies of Plagiarism.

This is actually the worst Soulslike game I've ever played. Its existence is an airtight argument for the abolishment of the Soulslike genre.

This game shamelessly copies the aesthetic of Bloodborne. It cherry-picks mechanics from From Software's contemporary releases, haphazardly combining them without attempting to ensure they actually gel.
It's been quite some time since I've played a game with mechanics that actively work against each other the way they do in this. Health regains after taking damage works in Bloodborne because you get rewarded for pressing your attack and maintaining aggression. It adds a sense of accelerated pace to the Souls formula.

It doesn't work when you tie the same mechanics to a block. This is compounded by the fact that blocks knock the player backward.

The parry is among the worst I've ever seen in a game. It's not a frame one parry, and the window is a super tight eight frames--that also locks you into a long animation--so it feels like it has a half-second input delay. This means you have to parry before the attacks hit. It's not difficult, but it just feels unsatisfying. Moreover, the parry barely builds stagger meter, but failing to execute it results in half of your health (or more) being taken, so it's mostly taking a considerable risk for little reward.

The dodge, like many of the character's latent abilities, is underpowered because someone decided that carving out abilities that players should just have and throwing them into a skill tree was a good idea. It's a pathetic way to try and force some layer of progression. Still, it is an active detriment to the experience.

Couple these issues with the fact that bosses have far too much health and very few windows for attack, and these encounters mostly boil down to tests of patience.
It's not even particularly challenging. It just feels fucking awful play. If you're gonna emulate something you closely, you better not miss, and Lies of P fucking whiffs in an almost impressive fashion.

It's clear that the developers did not actually understand the games they were ripping off. Instead, they took unharmonious mechanics, tried to slap them together, and made slight adjustments so it didn't look like they straight-up copied From's homework.

But like the kid in school that tried to cheat off of you, they fucking failed.

this game has some cool ideas but it feels like it took the worst aspects of every fromsoft game and threw it in here.

there's so many cool weapons and weapon combinations you can get here but this game has that same fromsoft upgrade system thats been terrible since 2009 so you wont be able to actually use them

not crazy about the bosses here there's like 3 or 4 i would say i really liked but thats it

i dont even know what they were thinking with the parry system. in order to stagger the enemy not only do you have to parry them a bunch of times but you also have this super small window where you have to hit them with a charged attack that depending on your weapon takes forever to charge. if a boss decides to attack you during that window you're basically fucked. and there's no posture bar so you have no way of knowing when that stagger window is coming. you mix that with the most annoying delayed boss attacks that take forever to wind up and then hit you faster than you can react and it ruined the combat for me

sometimes this game will add some nice quality of life changes to the genre and then just have some baffling decisions. your souls are always outside the boss arena when you die in it, when you get an item related to a quest the game will tell you exactly which checkpoint you need to warp to in order to progress the quest, when you interact with a locked door it tells you exactly what key you need. and then there's also doors that only open when you kill a specific big enemy and the door looks the same as the other doors in the game and you cant interact with it at all + when you kill the enemy theres no warning that the door opened it just opens without you even noticing.

there are so many different systems and materials for upgrading stuff and so many tutorials that it gets so confusing and overwhelming. there's a material for your skill tree, there's like 10 different materials for weapon upgrades, one for crafting arms, one for upgrading arms, one for altering your weapon handle, one for altering your grindstone, one for summoning and there's a gold coin that just shows up halfway through the game and is on a real timer to grow back for some reason.

there's also the cube system which just didn't work for me. i actually have no idea if its a glitch or i missed something. it's supposed to be like the physick flasks from elden ring where its a consumable you use to get a certain buff and then it resets when you die/rest but for me it just didnt happen. i would use it once and then the wishstone dissapears and i would have to buy it back with the gold coins.

this game also has all the other soulslike problems. enemies stunlocking you, enemies making you get stuck in a corner, annoying status effects, poison swamp, bosses/enemies with too much HP, bosses where multiple enemies attack you at once (there have been some good ones in other games but its very rare)

i didnt mention the story because i barely remember anything about it but i hated gemini constantly talking. i dont think every soulslike needs to be cryptic about its story and have everything in item descriptions but i also dont think i need an npc saying "wow look at all these corpses! what happened here?"

all of the cool weapons and the weapon combination system and enemy designs feel like they would have fit so well in a character action game but the soulslike elements of this game ruined it for me.

Good:
-Great production values, good graphics.
-Surprisingly good enemy variety.
Mixed:
-Is very parry-centric, if you don't like parrying don't play it.
-is a linear game.
Bad:
-it has Elden Ring syndrome in which enemies delay their attacks too much and are hyperaggressive.
-Gemini is a redditor
-The setting is stupid, i mean, a videogame free adaptation of Pinocchio? Are you fucking kidding me!? the developers are korean for god sake, Couldn't they have made a video game about the Samhan Era? (The Three Kingdoms of Korea)

Done.

Currently going through this... It's tough, might be the most frustrating souls-like game I've played (I haven't tried the Nioh games).
This game gets it. It gets the sound design of FromSoft games, it gets the aesthetic, the cryptic messages and storytelling, the weight of every attack, everything in the technical department is top notch.
What it doesn't get is itself, it doesn't know what it wants to be. At times, it's a Bloodborne style, agressive type of game, at others, it's a Sekiro inspired parry fest. Most of the time, though, it's neither. Lies of P simply does not have the polish or the mechanical understanding that comes with creating a genre: the enemies feel unbalanced, the parry is awkward and unreliable, the dodge animations are deceiving, every boss just has way too much HP. Still, you can't say it's not charming, in a lot of ways the frustration helps to build that relationship with the player, the relationship only souls games create. And you have to wonder, everything is just so well made, you wouldn't think they'd leave out some of the jank in the gameplay side of things on purpose, right? Right?!

Edit: Yeah that's enough for me, bosses have too much health and every other boss has two phases. I'm not that good at these games lol

To be honest, If I had played this game in a bubble with no prior experience from any other games I would have really really liked it. Unfortunately I have played Sekiro and Elden Ring. This game's parry system is ass, enemies delay their attacks that makes it look silly and not fun to play against, and delayed attacks mostly have animations that you cannot physically react to, so you have to memorise how long you have to wait which is not fun for me in the slightest. Towards the end almost every boss has a second phase which gets tiring really fast. The element system is good and weapon alteration is fun. That's about it, it's a solid game that is pushed back by trying to make it difficult without going through the right procedures and it feeling artificial afterwards.

Not going to lie I don't know about this one. I think if you're a real diehard for this genre, Bloodborne especially, and are willing to put aside some really baffling design choices (enemy patterns, system decisions, etc) and at best mediocre writing, aesthetics and performances I'm sure you'll get something out of this.

A little note about parries in soulsbornes:

I understand wanting to do a parry system, Sekiro is cool and great and that parry is crucial to it, but this and Wo Long both miss the core aspect of it feeling extremely satisfying to actually do. In DS, a parry is met with a sound effect with some weight, a noticeable stagger and attached opening for a cool finisher. In Lies of P, we instead get the perfect block system, which is close, but the payoff is a red light, a kinda-muted klang, and then a stagger that requires a follow up attack (that can miss and still lets the enemy attack you) and then ANOTHER attack, which for me at least sometimes didn't work. All of this for a limp canned animation. The payoff just isn't there, and that's kinda demonstrative of this game as a whole; cool stuff, but the payoff is missing or limp.