This is either the worst good game I've ever played or the most creative bad game I've ever played. If it weren't for the immensely cool art and some really bold swings that the designers made in the dungeons, puzzles, and class designs, I would rate this a 1/5 on the balancing of the gameplay experience alone. I can't invest the time into fully laying out all of my thoughts on it because most of them would be negative and honestly the list of nitpicky, lack-of-polish issues I have is beyond my ability to recollect without scrubbing through my recordings of playing through the whole thing.
Having played a full Veteran Campaign with 2-3 player co-op, and having jumped around some friends' campaigns, I got a good sense of most of the bosses, different quests, and general game balance. A handful of bosses are good, but a lot of bosses are just straight up the rudest, least interactive, and most annoying bosses I've ever seen in a video game. Also, a lot of the game is full of bugs -- the worst I encountered was that my entire town of NPCs had their dialog trees reset in the last act of the game! And this bug is common! I work on video games, I know how save states work, and I deeply fear the codebase that allows that to even happen. However, the end of the game's story literally doesn't matter or have any weight, so I guess really the bugs had ludonarrative relevance.
The game is also pretty much incomplete -- I expect a TON of balancing and economy changes to be added between now and the inevitable DLC. This is not a live-service game with a battle pass and steady stream of content, so the absolutely busted balancing and item economy being fixed after launch isn't really something that feels acceptable in my eyes. Most players play a game in the first month and do not return to it, and this game probably should've just been in early access for 6 months in order to release in an actually tested and balanced state.
The dungeons, puzzles, and quests have a lot of really cool highlights and also some of the dumbest bullshit I've ever heard of in a game. The creativity is off the wall, but the wildly inconsistent methods through which various secrets are hidden means that probably >75% of players will simply be using guides through the ENTIRE experience. I personally like puzzles that feel like I have a good chance of being able to figure them out on my own, but in this case, literally entire sub-classes are hidden behind interactions that no one would ever organically discover. There were 2 specific weapons I wanted to try out a specific type of build, and it turned out it was nearly impossible to even get the conditions to spawn in the biome necessary for one of those weapons, so I gave up after 2 hours. Additionally, you literally CAN'T use public matchmaking to seek out more obscure puzzles and rewards because there is NO method to communicate inside the game itself.
My closing thought is that this game has NOTHING fundamentally in common with the experience of a Soulslike game in some VERY crucial ways. The most important issue is that NO MATTER WHAT, regardless of your grinding, regardless of your progression, regardless of your build, you WILL die in 1 hit to MANY boss attacks throughout the ENTIRE experience of this game on Veteran or above while playing co-op. You WILL die in 2 hits to almost ALL OTHER boss attacks. Additionally, there is NOTHING you can do to get a pause or cooldown in any boss fight, they will NEVER stop attacking, you cannot get away from them, and you cannot see everything that they are doing to damage you at all times.
This is NOT the experience of a "hard but fair game," this is an experience that only maintains its co-op "hard game balance" through a grueling and unforgiving slog of endless attacks, endless arena-spanning hazards, and damage values that constantly try your patience. No sweat to anyone who LIKES that experience, but it cannot be said that this is ANYTHING like the experience of any other product found in this game's DNA.
Having played a full Veteran Campaign with 2-3 player co-op, and having jumped around some friends' campaigns, I got a good sense of most of the bosses, different quests, and general game balance. A handful of bosses are good, but a lot of bosses are just straight up the rudest, least interactive, and most annoying bosses I've ever seen in a video game. Also, a lot of the game is full of bugs -- the worst I encountered was that my entire town of NPCs had their dialog trees reset in the last act of the game! And this bug is common! I work on video games, I know how save states work, and I deeply fear the codebase that allows that to even happen. However, the end of the game's story literally doesn't matter or have any weight, so I guess really the bugs had ludonarrative relevance.
The game is also pretty much incomplete -- I expect a TON of balancing and economy changes to be added between now and the inevitable DLC. This is not a live-service game with a battle pass and steady stream of content, so the absolutely busted balancing and item economy being fixed after launch isn't really something that feels acceptable in my eyes. Most players play a game in the first month and do not return to it, and this game probably should've just been in early access for 6 months in order to release in an actually tested and balanced state.
The dungeons, puzzles, and quests have a lot of really cool highlights and also some of the dumbest bullshit I've ever heard of in a game. The creativity is off the wall, but the wildly inconsistent methods through which various secrets are hidden means that probably >75% of players will simply be using guides through the ENTIRE experience. I personally like puzzles that feel like I have a good chance of being able to figure them out on my own, but in this case, literally entire sub-classes are hidden behind interactions that no one would ever organically discover. There were 2 specific weapons I wanted to try out a specific type of build, and it turned out it was nearly impossible to even get the conditions to spawn in the biome necessary for one of those weapons, so I gave up after 2 hours. Additionally, you literally CAN'T use public matchmaking to seek out more obscure puzzles and rewards because there is NO method to communicate inside the game itself.
My closing thought is that this game has NOTHING fundamentally in common with the experience of a Soulslike game in some VERY crucial ways. The most important issue is that NO MATTER WHAT, regardless of your grinding, regardless of your progression, regardless of your build, you WILL die in 1 hit to MANY boss attacks throughout the ENTIRE experience of this game on Veteran or above while playing co-op. You WILL die in 2 hits to almost ALL OTHER boss attacks. Additionally, there is NOTHING you can do to get a pause or cooldown in any boss fight, they will NEVER stop attacking, you cannot get away from them, and you cannot see everything that they are doing to damage you at all times.
This is NOT the experience of a "hard but fair game," this is an experience that only maintains its co-op "hard game balance" through a grueling and unforgiving slog of endless attacks, endless arena-spanning hazards, and damage values that constantly try your patience. No sweat to anyone who LIKES that experience, but it cannot be said that this is ANYTHING like the experience of any other product found in this game's DNA.