I ultimately found this not quite as good as the first. They made a lot of the same mistakes as the first, did some sidegrades, but also managed some improvements (thank fucking god there's more than one biome)

There's some odd choices with enemies - garm and bolt saurians are crazy rare, there's only one medusa -nit tje mew enemies are fun enough to fight.

The much yelled about Dragonplague might be the most meaningless mechanic in the game. In 64 hours I found 1 pawn with it who I immediately dismissed and then had to dump mine into the ocean to cure her.

A postgame mechanic suffers the same problem. It hypes itself up but then isn't as bad as it claims and is mitigated very easily.

I found most of the new vocations boring. Trickster was terrible, Mystic Spearhand never felt strong enough, and Warfarer was too awkward to deal with.

The reworked old ones were mostly fine. I skipped mage & sorcerer for myself, but did all the others. Archer felt funky until I started abusing the dropkick->kick off->headshot combo which feels so goddamn good. Thief is still idiot-proof. Warrior actually feels good. Mystic Archer is still sick. Fighter exists.

Also it has cat people and as a vile heathen I think the girl cats are cute. My best friends in the end credits were the empress and the beastren girl who works in the Battahl cosmetic shop, and my faithful pawn, Lemu Ador, put up with me trying desperately to only put her in slutty clothes.

I also still prefer the first game's post-game and true final boss (especially in NG+!!!!). The ones here aren't bad but eh.

The story is also lol. The first one didnt have a very good one until around postgame and this one follows suit. Lots of snooze-worthy Game of Thrones lite shit. There isn't even a cute knight gal like in the first. Where's my she-goat cowards!!!! I guess the beast princess's bodyguard is close enough...

The microtransaction kerfuffle is also meaningless. The existence of them sucks. Nothing in the game has been fucked with to make you buy them either. The portcrystal DLC is worthless too as I believe there's a hard cap on how many can be out. And the postgame just plops a bunch of extra ones down too.

the busywork gets ridiculous (tho it isnt terribly hard to get all the chadley intel done), the minigames get tiresome, and chapter 13 is waaaaaay too fuckin long and filler-ridden for its own good.

that said - the music is superb as always (Go All Out Stamp and the arena rap being some highlights), the combat is even better than the first's, and the character writing is as impeccable as it was before.

some of the story is a bit eyerolling, and one plot thread is stretched way thin and has tens of hours between beats. counting myself ive seen three separate interpretations of the ending which is pretty impressive.

also that mind-flayer VR mission might be the absolute worst thing to put in this gameplay style. the ai in this game is not good enough to have a mission where you have to babysit your partners from constantly shifting aggro to adds instead of the boss

Marking as completed tho the major two bosses I gave up on were the final boss and the secret boss in Farum Azula bc fuck those guys.

Replaying as a twinblade-using, status-effect procing character really made me appreciate the good bits. You can annihilate most bosses if they're weak to bleed - even Mohg, lord of blood, was obliterated during his phase change.

But this also shows how dreadful bosses are who are immune. Valiant Gargoyles is a nightmare mostly because of their poison vomit taking up massive cunks of real estate+doing tick damage before it even procs. The final boss is immune to most worthwhile status effects, has crazy poise and stance, and too much heatlh. These are the Slog Bosses.

Still, excited to head into the DLC in June!

I approached this with equal amounts caution and curiosity. The first Lords of the Fallen I found terrible - stiff, slow gameplay; ugly art; lame white bald guy protagonist. This sounded a lot more interesting with the Light/Dark World mechanics and an actual custom protag.

It is very indebted to those that came before, as with everything in the genre. There's Sekiro/Lies of P parries (including Lie's grey health which in turn was taken from Bloodborne) and Dark Souls 2 enemy placement and power stancing.

A lot of takes I saw involved the enemy placement. It relies heavily on a few tricks - one big guy and a bunch of little guys, a group of normal guys and a ranged guy, and my least favorite, the asshole behind something you can't see who hits you with a cheap shot or knocks you off a cliff. The Dark World exacerbates this with constant spawning of little guys.

Speaking of, "Umbral", the dark world, is something of a missed opportunity. You use it largely to get through gates that only exist in "Axiom" (light world) or cross bridges that don't exist there or pull some blue guys to open a Umbral-only path or to kill a creature blocking your path in both worlds. You can travel to Umbral by dying or by using your lantern; and the only way back to Axiom is dying again, resting at a bonfire-equivalent, or using a fucked up little skeleton guy at certain points in the map.

Enemy variety is lacking. By the area Fitzroy's Gorge you've seen basically 90% of the enemies. It will place minibosses and then make them high-tier enemies later (sometimes immediately, in the case of the ice witch; or much much later in the case of the flail-wielding woman). Umbra has it much worse - it only has zombie, spitting zombie, asshole gargoyles, black reaper, moth woman, faceman, and red reaper.

There are some cool main bosses - Dervla probsbly being my favorite. It definitely collapses as it goes. My penultimate boss stared at a corner for the last 1/3rd of his health bar because his AI thought the NPC summon was still alive. The final boss was a snooze-inducing gimmick - I saw another review here comparing to to Deacons of the Deep from Dark Souls 3 and yea imagine that but with the color grading of Lost Izalith.

The NPCs and their storylines are pretty dull. The one I found interesting in concept was Kukajin, who becomes a boss summon after you save her in an early area. The catch is if you beat the boss, she demands a cut of the souls you earn.

The performance was fine. The snowy area consistently couldn't bear to ever properly load textures on trees. There was a late-game area that chugged hard. I had one crash while running from a save point to another area.

The way it handles save points is a fun idea - you have a much smaller amount of set bonfire equivalents, and in NG+ it successively removes some of them. You can instead place a vestige seed at certain points (only one at a time tho) which adds a bit of strategy to exploration.

My favorite part of the game was around the midpoint where it felt like I had a ton of options to explore. I had the ash-ridden city (which felt like half the game jesus fucking christ), the snowy fief, and the mine. But that ended up being the only part with freedom. It's very linear, more so than the Souls games.

The game itself felt long in the tooth. The burnt-out ashy city I mentioned felt like it took 10+ hours to get thru. By the time I got to the final area I was looking at a guide the entire time and groaning at how long it was gonna be with no new enemies and loot that wasn't worth picking up.

I will say it was fun as fuck to dual wield greatswords - oh I mean "longswords". I honestly don't know how awful it'd be to not dual wield em because doing dodge-R2 or running-R2 staggered enemies all the time and lighter weapons seem dreadful in comparison.

That reminds me of one thing that consistently infuriated me - the infernal enchantress enemy has a flamethrower attack with like infinite fucking hyper armor. Nothing breaks it. If you get hit you're fucking dead.

It isn't as terrible as I feared - or how people have treated it. It's a rough artifact that will definitely filter those not willing to push thru some boring stuff, some bad stuff, and some annoying cliches and design choices.

As a final note, if you want to play this game or go back to it and you're having problems with enemy hordes: ammo is free bro. It restocks when you rest and I had 40+ of the satchel consumables that refill it by the end of the game. Abuse those poison gas bombs and umbral borrowers. Yea its cheesy but so is this genre lmao

EDIT: OH YEAH THE JUMP SUCKS. How is it WORSE than the Dark Souls 1/Bloodborne jump holy shit

after all the fixes, pretty great. even before the big 2.0 fix I was all-in, had like 8 hours clocked before even going back to Jackie to finish the prolog

there's a lot of fun side stories, great acting all around (especially Keanu playing against type and clearly enjoying the hell out of his role), and plenty of minor diversions.

there's still glitchiness - i've seen cops clip thru the ground a lot, the last couple gigs never spawned, I had a main quest from Phantom Liberty reappear in my quest log, etc.

the difficulty collapses in on itself when you figure out a good build but its still fun to mess around with different weapon types. i basically only used pistols, shotguns, and katanas but they were all satisfying in their own way. chaining headshots with a revolver or dashing in to obliterate someone with a heavy shotgun rocks.

there was stuff i didnt really like - the game trying to push kerry and river as romance options on me when judy is already in my apartment or panam's stoyline in general - but the highs were enough for me to not care.

If I include the changes to the base game that dropped alongside it, the rating would be higher. But on its own I didn't really care for it. Some cool set pieces and loot but no characters or plot points that I found engaging.

I hated the last mission. It made sense as a climactic sequence and story-wise but it went on for way too long and takes the shittiest part of bad horror games (being insta-killed if you fumble mediocre stealth mechanics).

Mr Hands was cool and the post-game quest where you pretend to be the Cuban was fun tho

The father of the Souls juggernaut that's consumed portions of the gameosphere, it still holds up in its own way.

Parts are mechanically more primitive - the combat and the four-way roll - while others are stranger in ways that have never been repeated (world and character tendencies). The bosses are largely gimmick or spectacle pieces with only two that are actually difficult battles, and there's no checkpoints only shortcuts.

The game itself is largely unchanged from its original form with only a few things different. They added the ability to change appearance or reset NPC aggro, added some consumables, the mirror mode, and the optional coin hunt. Some bugs are fixed. Some aren't. Some that were fixed were harmless, pro-player exploits (Maneater). Some that weren't fixed fuck you (Ostrava never showed up in 1-4 despite rescuing him in 1-3, really cool we chose not to fucking fix that).

The visual changes are a mixed bag. Some look nice. The particle effects are cool but very distracting sometimes. Some of the armor changes are fucking awful - the Fluted Armor looks terrible compared to the iconic original, and Yuria's set, an armor set called the RAGGED SET is not ragged and looks NOTHING like it does in the original.

The audio is also worse overall. The sfx sounds bad and is too slavish to the modern audio tropes of "bass heavy fart noises" which is most noticeable in the magic and fire effects (esp. Flamelurker's slam attack. awful.) Other minor sounds like the "woo? ooo~" hoot of the 4-2 ghosts have been flattened into a generic spooky warble, the Fat Official laugh is barely a chuckle...

The music is better on a purely technical level but it all sounds indistinguishable from modern orchestra slop and it never fits the pacing or atmosphere of a fight.

Most damning is how they butchered the Maiden in Black and character creation themes. The former isn't even recognizable, and the latter removes the ethereal synth for the world's most generic piano plinks. And you can't offer the original soundtrack in the options? Its the bare minimum I expect for remastermakes like this.

The game itself is still as good and genre-defining as it always was. But Bluepoint has failed to render what made it truly special. The texture that defined it has been sanded off for something far more generic in look and sound. I like that it exists but not the form its taken.

A really insane game. CRPG-esque character skills encompassing a weird crafting system that begs you to break the game entirely (and tbh I think it demands you to for those superbosses).

The pacing is brisk and never feels like you're spinning wheels (a plus of the PS1/SNES era), the characters are charming, Motoi Sakuraba proves his talent (arranged & original soundtracks? this is what remakes should be like).

One complaint I had turned out to be a skill issue (i thought fishing had no easy indicator of what you could catch but turns out you just stand there) but the only thing I do think is a problem is how hard the combat is to parse at times. Particle effects and clouds can make you lose track of your guy pretty often.

Also love the ability to choose between different art styles but not a fan of how it only matters in the Status menu. And not a fan of the PSP art which looks like shit. How to Draw Manga-ass garbage

Time to be let down by all the sequels!

my opinion of this, 4 years after release, aint changed much. i did find the combat and parrying more palatable (if not baby easy in comparison). the story is still too generic and threadbare, it still has bad performance at times... i also had a ton of trouble with the heal actually going off. not sure if i kept animation-cancelling accidentally or if its just bad design. leaning to the former.

also terrible terrible map. i spent like 20 minutes trying to figure out how to reach a certain area to get one of the last terrarium seeds i needed bc of how hard to parse it is. 3d maps in games were solved in the year of our lord 2002 by a little game called metroid prime. this game has no excuse for its map being as dogshit as it be

12 years ago, around this same time I played Alan Wake at a perfect time - the time I was devouring Stephen King novels, having finally been afforded the freedom from parental dictate. Its narrative being a very obvious King pastiche/love letter, it was an obvious fit.

But now, 12 years on - still good. The combat and gameplay is still dookie but I found myself appreciating the story even more. And this time, not on 360 I could appreciate how crazy the lighting and fog/smoke effects are.

I think my biggest problem with combat is how often it spawns enemies behind you. I died multiple times because three dudes rushed me from behind and got a wombo combo going that I had no way to escape from.

I now need to get a ps5 so I can have a way to play AW2.

A game that does a lot right but just as much "wrong" - or at least "shit I don't like". I like multipart boss fights but the balance is skewed way too heavily towards them.

The block/parry system feels like it was designed around having a baseline of the player having beaten a Kuro's Charm run in Sekiro with how strict the timings are.

I liked the way it handled weapons and damage types (tho I think acid and fire getting DOT effects and electric only getting bonus stagger is kinda lame even if I get it). Being able to essentially craft your own weapon out of handles and blades is cool, but there's definitely handles that are better than others and ones that are much much worse than others.

Its ultimately frustrating that so much of this was on-point but I couldn't push past the stuff I disliked or hated to make it through till the end

also fuck the fact that stalker bosses get to have poise when you dont