Disclaimer: I'm the first to admit that I'm not very good at 3D brawlers so YMMV I guess
I played this way back when it came out and finally got around to finishing it. I remember loving it back then, and I enjoyed the earlier chapters as I replayed through them. The early battles felt smooth and the first quarter or so of the game kept up a good difficulty curve. Also, the town-building sections were a welcome addition, giving the dopamine rush of progression every time you unlocked new abilities or new weapons. But it just got harder and harder, in a very cheap and annoying way. Most of them had to do with way too much stuff going on in a 3D environment.
- Set-pieces where you have to fight multiple enemy heroes plus armored vehicles that surround you and pepper you with projectiles. It's obviously nowhere near a bullet hell shooter, but at least in bullet hell shooters you can see the whole screen. In this game you are going to get hit repeatedly without even seeing what you are getting hit by.
- Some terribly painful platforming sections. For example, there's a sequence where you need to gradually climb several layers of platforms by jumping through holes in the layer above. This would be fine, except... the camera positioning doesn't show the platform above so you can't see where the holes are!
- The enemy heroes are mostly overpowered, super-armoring through all your attacks, then bringing you from full health down to dead with a single juggle combo. This meant that rather than feeling like a badass, swinging my sword and knocking down 10 enemies (as is tradition with this series), I spent basically all of the boss fights shooting them with poison arrows and running away.
- Maybe my difficulties above were because I was playing with a lightweight speed-heavy character. I would have tried a different character but every new character who joins you does so at level 1 which means the process of bringing them up to a viable level is too tedious.
If any of the above were improved I would probably give the game a much higher score. I feel bad about rating it this low, but unfortunately it crossed the Bullshit Event HorizonTM when the amount of times I yelled "this is bullshit!" ceased to be isolated moments of frustration and became my main experience of the game.
I played this way back when it came out and finally got around to finishing it. I remember loving it back then, and I enjoyed the earlier chapters as I replayed through them. The early battles felt smooth and the first quarter or so of the game kept up a good difficulty curve. Also, the town-building sections were a welcome addition, giving the dopamine rush of progression every time you unlocked new abilities or new weapons. But it just got harder and harder, in a very cheap and annoying way. Most of them had to do with way too much stuff going on in a 3D environment.
- Set-pieces where you have to fight multiple enemy heroes plus armored vehicles that surround you and pepper you with projectiles. It's obviously nowhere near a bullet hell shooter, but at least in bullet hell shooters you can see the whole screen. In this game you are going to get hit repeatedly without even seeing what you are getting hit by.
- Some terribly painful platforming sections. For example, there's a sequence where you need to gradually climb several layers of platforms by jumping through holes in the layer above. This would be fine, except... the camera positioning doesn't show the platform above so you can't see where the holes are!
- The enemy heroes are mostly overpowered, super-armoring through all your attacks, then bringing you from full health down to dead with a single juggle combo. This meant that rather than feeling like a badass, swinging my sword and knocking down 10 enemies (as is tradition with this series), I spent basically all of the boss fights shooting them with poison arrows and running away.
- Maybe my difficulties above were because I was playing with a lightweight speed-heavy character. I would have tried a different character but every new character who joins you does so at level 1 which means the process of bringing them up to a viable level is too tedious.
If any of the above were improved I would probably give the game a much higher score. I feel bad about rating it this low, but unfortunately it crossed the Bullshit Event HorizonTM when the amount of times I yelled "this is bullshit!" ceased to be isolated moments of frustration and became my main experience of the game.