Fantasy action-souls in a Chinese mythological setting. A bit of a mixed bag overall but I liked it a lot despite the problems.
The combat is the main focus here, it's very fast paced and momentum based with an emphasis on parrying rather than dodging. Instead of attacks costing stamina, you gain stamina on successful hits and parries which can then be used for special attacks like weapon arts in Elden Ring. Enemies also have a 'stamina' bar that can be broken down leading to them being staggered and you get a free attack with a crazy anime animation. I had a fun time with the combat once I knew what was going on but found it a bit button-mashy and repetitive later on, 1vX feels pretty bad also.
The difficulty is a bit all over the place but it’s not generally unfair, just obscure since there are a lot of mechanics and the tutorialisation is not effective despite being heavy-handed. This is probably less of an issue if you are more familiar with Team Ninja or action games in general. I’m not, so there was a steep difficulty curve at times but after Lu Bu clapped me for 4 hours, I learnt how to play the game properly and it was smooth sailing from there.
The level design is much simpler than Souls, you have a little bit of exploration and some shortcuts but it's set in discrete levels that mostly take less than an hour to see and fight everything, then you finish with a boss and a cutscene to setup the next level. It’s much more old-school and arcadey than Dark Souls so don’t expect as much immersion but there are some neat environments and a lot of cool design ideas for bosses. The music is also a strong point.
Unfortunately, the game doesn’t stick the landing when it comes to the visuals, there are some nice colours and effects but the finished product looks half-baked, the shadows and lighting look scuffed and many assets are reused or low-detail. I think with a bit more work, this game could look really great but as is, it's mostly scuffed like Dark Souls 2 but less ugly.
This becomes more of a problem when you factor in the performance issues of this game, this is one of the worst games I've played on a technical level. It was almost unplayable for me on my previous PC but I recently upgraded to a 7800x3D which is more or less the best CPU for gaming and it's still poor. You can play this game at 120 fps which is nice but the frametimes feel terrible unless you are maxed out and using an external FPS cap. I had to play at a lower resolution with image scaling and DLSS to try and maintain performance but even that wasn’t consistent. The native game scaling makes turns any low resolution into a blurry mess so I did that in my desktop. Also, custom resolutions don't work and you can't change half of the graphical settings from in-game which is particularly annoying because the loading times for this game are incredibly long, far longer than any game I can remember playing on PC. I must have spent hours trying to configure this game optimally. My end result was playable enough but I'm going to put off the DLCs and other side-content for a future playthrough when my PC can handle this game more comfortably. This is a decent game let down by a garbage port.
The combat is the main focus here, it's very fast paced and momentum based with an emphasis on parrying rather than dodging. Instead of attacks costing stamina, you gain stamina on successful hits and parries which can then be used for special attacks like weapon arts in Elden Ring. Enemies also have a 'stamina' bar that can be broken down leading to them being staggered and you get a free attack with a crazy anime animation. I had a fun time with the combat once I knew what was going on but found it a bit button-mashy and repetitive later on, 1vX feels pretty bad also.
The difficulty is a bit all over the place but it’s not generally unfair, just obscure since there are a lot of mechanics and the tutorialisation is not effective despite being heavy-handed. This is probably less of an issue if you are more familiar with Team Ninja or action games in general. I’m not, so there was a steep difficulty curve at times but after Lu Bu clapped me for 4 hours, I learnt how to play the game properly and it was smooth sailing from there.
The level design is much simpler than Souls, you have a little bit of exploration and some shortcuts but it's set in discrete levels that mostly take less than an hour to see and fight everything, then you finish with a boss and a cutscene to setup the next level. It’s much more old-school and arcadey than Dark Souls so don’t expect as much immersion but there are some neat environments and a lot of cool design ideas for bosses. The music is also a strong point.
Unfortunately, the game doesn’t stick the landing when it comes to the visuals, there are some nice colours and effects but the finished product looks half-baked, the shadows and lighting look scuffed and many assets are reused or low-detail. I think with a bit more work, this game could look really great but as is, it's mostly scuffed like Dark Souls 2 but less ugly.
This becomes more of a problem when you factor in the performance issues of this game, this is one of the worst games I've played on a technical level. It was almost unplayable for me on my previous PC but I recently upgraded to a 7800x3D which is more or less the best CPU for gaming and it's still poor. You can play this game at 120 fps which is nice but the frametimes feel terrible unless you are maxed out and using an external FPS cap. I had to play at a lower resolution with image scaling and DLSS to try and maintain performance but even that wasn’t consistent. The native game scaling makes turns any low resolution into a blurry mess so I did that in my desktop. Also, custom resolutions don't work and you can't change half of the graphical settings from in-game which is particularly annoying because the loading times for this game are incredibly long, far longer than any game I can remember playing on PC. I must have spent hours trying to configure this game optimally. My end result was playable enough but I'm going to put off the DLCs and other side-content for a future playthrough when my PC can handle this game more comfortably. This is a decent game let down by a garbage port.