honestly really wanted to like this game, but after about 2 hours or so of playing, i can definitively say this is fromsofts worst game.

the game is really lacking in areas dark souls excels at. there is no interconnected world, only scattered missions that all seem to take place in similar looking snowy destroyed cities.

the enemy design is practically non-existent, they just kind of stand there waiting for you to one shot you. an ambush never feels impactful because you can just stand at super far range and deal with every enemy efficiently, unlike dark souls which has extremely intense gank fights due to you having to engage them in melee combat, where you're constantly at risk and have to learn how to properly dodge every attack.

every boss is just a big ship that spams pretty much undodgeable attacks at you and you just facetank all the damage and wait for your sword to recharge (which takes like 10 years btw). from a company that has produced such excellent bosses as ornstein+smough and slave knight gael, i really would've expected better from them.

the controls feel fine until you actually have to use your weapons, all of which having extremely long cooldowns. the sword (the only fun weapon in the game imo) takes an especially long time to charge, meaning youre constantly waiting to have fun again. youll notice good games from this studio like dark souls never had such problems, because they realized waiting 80 years for a weapon to recharge isnt fun at all.

the game constantly interupts you with walls of dialogue that is not well written in the slightest before every single mission. i thought we should've learned from dark souls that the best way to tell a story (of which dark souls has a far more interesting one) is through subtle hints in the world and in item descriptions or optional dialogue with characters.

dark souls had an incredibly praised checkpoint system which required you to complete a large chunk of a level before you got a checkpoint. armored core 6, reduces these chunks, removing all sense of tension from the game. at this point, might as well just make me immortal since death doesnt even matter at all.

the last thing i want to really touch on in this review is the healing system. for some bizarre reason, fromsoft has forgotten one of their most innovative design decisions, which was the estus flask systems from dark souls. part of what made it so great was the fact that it forced you to be stuck in place for a few seconds before you were allowed to move again, making it something you had to sacrifice your attack phase to use. unfortunately, armored core 6 foolishly does not make use of this system, allowing you to instantly heal, which at that point, you might as well just extend the healthbar because there is no point to healing.

overall, a massive disappointment from a studio i love. definitely making me doubt whether or not the upcoming elden ring dlc will be good considering the design decisions they were willing to make here.

everything about this game has so much personality and charm, it improves on basically everything from the original game. theres only like 1 bad level in this entire game, the rest of it is a blast.

even the missions with goals that arent just making something as big as possible within a time limit, which i actively disliked in the original, are super fun in this game.

the king has extra personality in this game, basically every scene involving him was super funny even if it was the same joke literally every time someone asks for help.

the game is also set at the perfect length, being almost twice as long as damacy, which was my biggest issue with damacy, it felt like it ended just as i was beginning to get really into it.

namco pls reroll this game thank you very much

edit: thank you very much namco

vampire survivors presents you with a pretty interesting proposal. taking much inspiration from bullet hell games, a genre about burning bullet patterns into your memory to eventually overcome them and gaining that immense sense of satisfaction, but flipping the genre on its head to where you get to feel like you are that powerful boss, able to kill most enemies in 1 or 2 hits, and id say its pretty good at making you feel that way.

the game consists of walking around for 30 minutes, auto battling enemies, and picking up xp for more upgrades, with each run contributing to a money total that can be used to buy permanent unlock upgrades or new characters. this doesnt sound very fun, and in a lot of ways if youre looking for a deep game this probably isnt it, the deepest this game runs are with the different upgrades you can get, and even then they dont really change the way you play THAT much. its also not that deep in terms of difficulty, as the entire game is so easy most people could probably beat it without much challenge.

but where this game is fun is in 2 areas. 1 is that sense of power you get from decimating every enemy on screen through something that you feel like you built up yourself every run, and the game is very consistent about that sense of power. 2 is the feeling that every run youre doing is continually building to new discoveries, more upgrades, this game turned me into a completionist when i didnt even mean to be when i first started.

the game was also really good when it came to a sense of discovery. not only does almost every weapon have a secret evolution stage but some can be combined, and i think this is a great system for introducing a cool new way of evaluating what you want for a build, like you might want to take a certain passive because itd be good for the build but the evolution with the corresponding weapon might not be something you want for your build, so its kind of a constant weighing of the options thats really cool and gives the game some level of depth.

the arcana cards are actually what i found can change the run the most, with some abilities heavily altering how your kit will function, and its another layer of decision making you get to make with your build.

there are some bad aspects though. the game features a variety of levels, but for the most part a lot of them play pretty much the exact same with some exceptions. the game has pretty intense framerate issues, which as far as i know even appear on higher end PCs, which is a shame. the game also just doesnt really visually appeal to me all that much. ive never been a huge fan of castlevania aesthetics or even vampire aesthetics in general.

the music is also pretty bland and forgettable. i found myself just putting on my own music most of the time, which to me worked perfectly.

the game is designed pretty similarly to how slot machines are designed, which has caused some controversy as of late, and is seen by many as predatory. personally, i think its arguable that its predatory, but i also think games as a medium are kind of designed to be predatory. as time has gone on, video games have gotten more flashy, more satisfying, easier to beat and play, but in reality all these effects are just kind of designed to get you to play them more.

i think what constitutes predatory has less to do with the methods used and moreso to do with the methods plus the outcome, and i think a game just using slot machine like design to be more satisfying and thus addictive but the only thing its eating is your time is fine. we tend not to value our time very much, despite the naturally limited amount of it we have. just because a game ends up using a lot of that time doesnt mean its predatory, because i think youd have to be against most of gaming as a whole to say that, because you have to think its an inherently bad thing to trick people into spending their time playing a game.

overall, i think this is a good game, but its nothing thats gonna blow your mind or anything.