I wrote my initial thoughts on this game in a huff after getting stuck on the first boss for quite a while, but I have persevered and made it over the hump and completed the rest of the game without too much trouble. Having passed that initial frustrating barrier, my opinion has softened considerably.
The good:
The combat systems are cool and fun. I like the health/wounds system, I think that's neat and pushes you to play aggressively and mix up saber/claw attacks which is fun. Unlocking ingredient slots for your healing potions to give them extra effects is a cool idea. I like the various skill trees. I was a particular fan of the one that turns your claw into a shorter-range weapon with a fast combo, and once you get max Offensive stacks it heals you a bit. It reinforces that fun rhythm, of building up wounds and cutting them down with the claw, making sure to keep your stacks topped off and giving you chip heal. It all feels very good once you get everything flowing.
For a while I wasn't using the plague weapons much but eventually experimented until I found some I liked (knife ended up as my go-to!) which made everything feel even better and more fluid, and I’d encourage people to try them out as you unlock them and find one you like.
It’s also easy to reset all your talent points to try other builds which, frankly, I didn’t really do (it seems like the most significant of these would be going down the other claw upgrade path and doing deflect damage instead of window increases) but it does mean that if you allocate points weird or decide you want to do something else, it’s not a problem to fix.
I like the speed of the execution moves you do (in contrast to Sekiro where they take a second) but I would have loved for there to be some special animation for it. As it stands you just kinda nondescriptly lunge through the enemy and that’s it. Something flashier – even if it was just added particle effects – I think could have felt pretty cool.
Several of the bosses are great.
The bad:
There are times when the game throws multiple enemies at you and I never found a way to handle that gracefully. Every time there was a miniboss and a random trash mob with a spear at the same time, it was a nightmare. The bow knights are also annoying – they don’t swarm you with overlapping attacks like multiple melee enemies do, but the sound of them firing is EXTREMELY quiet, and they would almost always hit me at least once before I even realized they were there. I would have liked maybe a louder sound when they draw their bow to give you a second to prepare.
The targeting system often didn't feel quite right when attempting to switch targets; it wouldn't change, or I'd kill an enemy and the next enemy would be right behind me and it wouldn't want to acquire it. Dodging out of knockdown effect also felt like it sent me in a strange direction some of the time.
Some of the minibosses are a pain – the dual sword wielding knight attacks almost constantly and likes to jump away once his combo finishes which makes it harder to retaliate. I probably just needed to slow down and get a firmer grip on his patterns though.
I mentioned several bosses being great, and they are – unfortunately, there are some gimmick bosses that feel rather tedious. There’s one that places an environmental hazard down that kills you almost immediately, and I could never avoid it entirely, I ended up having to time several heals just right to survive until I could run out of it. Not sure what was going on there.
Another thing is that the sound seems weird. It's... muffled? Sometimes it's an enemy grunting through a mask or helmet which makes sense but the whole thing sounds a bit like you're hearing it through a pillow.
There were also a fair few times (especially with the aforementioned bow knights) where I would have an execution move queued up for an enemy that was near a ledge, and I would do it and Corvus would step too far past the enemy afterwards and fall down the ledge. This is only ever an annoyance, but it IS an annoyance. When this happened, and I fell off a ledge with enemies waiting for it at the top (or even when I just saw one of the bow knights in general) I really wished I had a sort of grappling hook that could pull me towards the enemy like in Spider-Man.
There’s not too much enemy variety. It’s mostly okay – it’s a short game, and giving you enemies you’re familiar with is an easy way to make you feel like a champ when you obliterate them – but there is one boss that, in Bloodborne parlance, is more Bloodstarved Beast than Father Gascoigne, and it worked pretty well! So I think some more non-humanoid enemies could have been nice rather than more spear guys or sword-and-board guys.
And, this goes for almost all games, but I hate clicking left stick to sprint. I don’t know what the solve for that is, I just think it feels bad every time and eventually I just stopped doing it. It doesn’t even feel that much faster honestly.
Overall, I think the combat systems here are pretty exceptional even if they don’t always jive with the times when the game throws multiple enemies at you. I would love to see my issues with targeting and dodging smoothed out even though my feedback probably is not specific enough to be helpful. I think this was pretty solid and I hope that we can eventually see more of this – maybe a little more refined, maybe a little more varied, but the core mechanics and systems are really very good.
Oh, also, my advice for someone struggling early on as I was is to put points into the talents that increase the Deflect window asap, and then spend a couple boss attempts just sitting back and trying to deflect stuff. I was going in way too aggressively and it made learning the patterns very hard. They don’t actually have that many attacks!
The good:
The combat systems are cool and fun. I like the health/wounds system, I think that's neat and pushes you to play aggressively and mix up saber/claw attacks which is fun. Unlocking ingredient slots for your healing potions to give them extra effects is a cool idea. I like the various skill trees. I was a particular fan of the one that turns your claw into a shorter-range weapon with a fast combo, and once you get max Offensive stacks it heals you a bit. It reinforces that fun rhythm, of building up wounds and cutting them down with the claw, making sure to keep your stacks topped off and giving you chip heal. It all feels very good once you get everything flowing.
For a while I wasn't using the plague weapons much but eventually experimented until I found some I liked (knife ended up as my go-to!) which made everything feel even better and more fluid, and I’d encourage people to try them out as you unlock them and find one you like.
It’s also easy to reset all your talent points to try other builds which, frankly, I didn’t really do (it seems like the most significant of these would be going down the other claw upgrade path and doing deflect damage instead of window increases) but it does mean that if you allocate points weird or decide you want to do something else, it’s not a problem to fix.
I like the speed of the execution moves you do (in contrast to Sekiro where they take a second) but I would have loved for there to be some special animation for it. As it stands you just kinda nondescriptly lunge through the enemy and that’s it. Something flashier – even if it was just added particle effects – I think could have felt pretty cool.
Several of the bosses are great.
The bad:
There are times when the game throws multiple enemies at you and I never found a way to handle that gracefully. Every time there was a miniboss and a random trash mob with a spear at the same time, it was a nightmare. The bow knights are also annoying – they don’t swarm you with overlapping attacks like multiple melee enemies do, but the sound of them firing is EXTREMELY quiet, and they would almost always hit me at least once before I even realized they were there. I would have liked maybe a louder sound when they draw their bow to give you a second to prepare.
The targeting system often didn't feel quite right when attempting to switch targets; it wouldn't change, or I'd kill an enemy and the next enemy would be right behind me and it wouldn't want to acquire it. Dodging out of knockdown effect also felt like it sent me in a strange direction some of the time.
Some of the minibosses are a pain – the dual sword wielding knight attacks almost constantly and likes to jump away once his combo finishes which makes it harder to retaliate. I probably just needed to slow down and get a firmer grip on his patterns though.
I mentioned several bosses being great, and they are – unfortunately, there are some gimmick bosses that feel rather tedious. There’s one that places an environmental hazard down that kills you almost immediately, and I could never avoid it entirely, I ended up having to time several heals just right to survive until I could run out of it. Not sure what was going on there.
Another thing is that the sound seems weird. It's... muffled? Sometimes it's an enemy grunting through a mask or helmet which makes sense but the whole thing sounds a bit like you're hearing it through a pillow.
There were also a fair few times (especially with the aforementioned bow knights) where I would have an execution move queued up for an enemy that was near a ledge, and I would do it and Corvus would step too far past the enemy afterwards and fall down the ledge. This is only ever an annoyance, but it IS an annoyance. When this happened, and I fell off a ledge with enemies waiting for it at the top (or even when I just saw one of the bow knights in general) I really wished I had a sort of grappling hook that could pull me towards the enemy like in Spider-Man.
There’s not too much enemy variety. It’s mostly okay – it’s a short game, and giving you enemies you’re familiar with is an easy way to make you feel like a champ when you obliterate them – but there is one boss that, in Bloodborne parlance, is more Bloodstarved Beast than Father Gascoigne, and it worked pretty well! So I think some more non-humanoid enemies could have been nice rather than more spear guys or sword-and-board guys.
And, this goes for almost all games, but I hate clicking left stick to sprint. I don’t know what the solve for that is, I just think it feels bad every time and eventually I just stopped doing it. It doesn’t even feel that much faster honestly.
Overall, I think the combat systems here are pretty exceptional even if they don’t always jive with the times when the game throws multiple enemies at you. I would love to see my issues with targeting and dodging smoothed out even though my feedback probably is not specific enough to be helpful. I think this was pretty solid and I hope that we can eventually see more of this – maybe a little more refined, maybe a little more varied, but the core mechanics and systems are really very good.
Oh, also, my advice for someone struggling early on as I was is to put points into the talents that increase the Deflect window asap, and then spend a couple boss attempts just sitting back and trying to deflect stuff. I was going in way too aggressively and it made learning the patterns very hard. They don’t actually have that many attacks!