An interesting mix of extreme highs and intense lows. The core combat system is pure, simple, but oh so incredibly satisfying. The game absolutely makes you feel like you're playing as Guts. Guts' sword swings feel absolutely incredible, with an intense, weighty feel, excellent SFX and feedback, a decent variety of moves to utilize, and incredible momentum and feel on every swipe, allowing you to use the momentum of the blade to bring yourself across the battlefield to help trim down the enemies. It's genuinely impressive how well they got the game feel down. The boss battles are also rock solid, with fun movesets with solid tells that make landing hits inbetween counters and blocks oh so satisfying. The game also animates like a dream, with incredibly detailed and fluid animations for both standard combat animations, but also the more cinematic attacks and counters in battle. The game is also rather technically impressive for the time as well, it includes a detailed dismemberment system when fighting the bosses that when combined with the excellent game-feel and fluid animations is just a blast to tear enemies to pieces in. The game also has a solid soundtrack, a good and faithful retelling of the Millennium arc with some interesting and non-intrusive additions, and is aesthetically pleasing overall.
However, to counteract those staggering highs, the game has some extremely strong faults. The level design sucks ass, with levels dragging on way, wayyyyy too long, and being way too meandering with long, extensive hallways and the majority of levels being semi-mazes with long straight paths from point to point making exploration flat out not fun. Several levels just flat out can be boring as shit to play, and when they drag on so long it can get borderline agonizing. The combat, while stellar, can also get extremely repetitive, as its the majority of what you'll be doing in the stages, as the game CONSTANTLY shits enemies out at you. They literally ceaselessly spawn 24/7 the entire time you explore, and when you're running across long, winding maze hallways as 26 quadrillion enemies spawn and chase you the entire time, it gets a bit repetitious.
However, to counteract those staggering highs, the game has some extremely strong faults. The level design sucks ass, with levels dragging on way, wayyyyy too long, and being way too meandering with long, extensive hallways and the majority of levels being semi-mazes with long straight paths from point to point making exploration flat out not fun. Several levels just flat out can be boring as shit to play, and when they drag on so long it can get borderline agonizing. The combat, while stellar, can also get extremely repetitive, as its the majority of what you'll be doing in the stages, as the game CONSTANTLY shits enemies out at you. They literally ceaselessly spawn 24/7 the entire time you explore, and when you're running across long, winding maze hallways as 26 quadrillion enemies spawn and chase you the entire time, it gets a bit repetitious.