A great game which ruins itself through its desperacy to be "difficult".
Fanastic art, fluid animation, decent plot progression, a simple and nice combat system.
"Historically accurate combat and challenging skill-based swordfighting!"
Half the enemy encounters in the game are archers, the first boss is an archer, the second boss is a mage, the third boss is a shield camper.
What part about the second boss being a sorcerer in a world that has no references to fantasy, or the first boss being an archer who can merge into the floor to teleport onto a rock; is historically accurate combat. What part of fighting a shield camper, archer, or sorcerer involves any kind of swordfighting. The protagonist uses a sword but almost nothing else does.
The archers ruin the game. As said, half the fights in the game involve archers just about. They have no telegraph on when they are about to shoot, the arrow flies extremely fast; and the players dodge only lasts half a second. You have to blindly guess when to dodge. You can try to pinpoint the timing between the archers shots, but you have to do that entirely by eye-balling it mentally and the timing changes based on the situation so it's not even consistent. Supposedly there is a crouch button too, which is not explained to the player; that would be great for dodging arrows if at hour two most of the archers didn't shoot from a vertical diagonal which you can't duck under.
The developers only way of increasing the games difficulty; instead of designing new, more powerful enemies; is to make you fight regular enemies while you get shot at. So in a reactive combat system, they force you to have to simultaneously keep track of two completely different sources of damage which each attack independently and each can only be responded to in a certain way and one of them doesn't even have a tell for when it's about to shoot you and when it does shoot you you've already been shot because it's that fast.
The bosses are just as bad. The first boss is literally an archer. You blindly dodge your way up to him, hit him once, he merges into the floor and reappears ontop of a rock; then infinitely shoots down at you until you arbitrarily back off to the left of the screen far enough until he jumps back off the rock. Then you repeat, until he dies, it makes no sense, it's not remotely fun, it's not even combat.
The second boss is a sorcerer who mass-spawns magical soldiers who spam their attacks endlessly while encroaching on your half of the screen; their attacks having more range then yours. The sorcerer can spawn up to four or more of them all in a row bearing down at you; while the sorcerer is shooting at you with his own magic. It's an ever advancing wall of damage with more range then you which you have to deal with in a time limit while getting shot at. When you finally overtake his magic soldiers and get point blank with him, his only remaining attacks are a sudden close range strike and a very slow and telegraphed block; so you basically just whack him while he occasionally instantly hits you; until he dies.
The third boss is a shield camper. He hides behind a massive shield jabbing at the player from a massive distance with his huge spear. Players have to struggle to get close enough to him to before he quickly recovers and begins attacking again, rapidly, while alternating sharply between both different attack stances all before the player can barely even land one hit. One hit, and often it results in you trading damage with him. If the player gets hit once they get knocked back and lose all their distance gain on him. This also isn't combat, this is grinding. Repetitious, pattern based chores dressed up like combat.
It seems that the game specifically avoids every single thing it promises. It says it has historical combat, you fight sorcerers, teleporting archers who can shoot at impossible angles, and gigantic stone shield camping man with mohawk helmet. It says it's skill based, all the difficult opponents either can only be fought with luck or repetitious trial and error. It says it's about sword fighting, most of the enemies you fight don't use swords and many don't even use melee. Game says it's got atmosphere, yet it has very little background sounds or background music, a huge heads-up display, lots of immersion breaking design choices, the proportions of a lot of the scenery look completely off. The developers idea of atmosphere is having a dust particle effect fall from the ceiling while you hear a crumbling sound, nothing else ever happens and they re-use that same effect multiple times.
Players can't heal either, they can regain armour to defend themselves, but their main health has to last through the entire level. If you die before activating a shortcut, redo everything, if you die and there isn't a shortcut; you literally have to replay the entire level and win every fight again all without healing each time.
The game also doesn't actively autosave, even when you exit the game, yet it also has no manual save button. So if you decide to quit a level halfway through you risk losing all your progress. Especially with shortcuts, which also don't trigger saves, so after you open a shortcut you must complete the level or have to replay up to that shortcut again the next time you return.
There's a host of smaller things with the game that can be found. Some animations require the character to spin one eighty degrees to face the proper direction, which looks horrible. The camera doesn't jump to new locations when the player goes through doors, it pans so you can see the blackness and all the other maps between the two locations which completely breaks immersion. Objects in the foreground can block your view, enemies can phase into walls if you back them up enough, you can't turn off controller vibration and the controller does not work well with menus at all. The game doesn't even tell you that holding down the attack button initiates a second attack, the game doesn't tell you how to crouch. The spear wielders can spam up to four attacks in a row, the giants constantly approach the player and never back up so they can literally back the player into a corner to the point where they can't move anymore. The giants also can knock players over then immediately hit them afterwards and a huge button prompt shows up over everything you can interact with which also breaks immersion.
All the smaller problems with the game, it's mutual, and the game itself is very well done. But the blatantly unfair design of the game and it's dedication to contradicting every single concept that it says it's about is just horrendous.
Not worth this price, at all. Maybe the game is ten hours long, I wouldn't know because I stopped playing at two hours when the game started pervasively using archers in every single fight while stacking up fights over and over all without any shortcuts; so if you die you have to complete all of it all over again to get back to where you were. All of it, every single fight, without healing. Each time you die.
This isn't fun or fair, I have zero reason to play a game that gives the player nothing but frustration and anger because it's meant to be a "difficult" and "skill" based game which is just glorified poor game design worshipped by insecure l33t brats online who can't tell the difference between fair and unfair challenge.
Your game isn't remotely skill based and it isn't remotely challenging, it's trial and error. Bashing your skull against the wall until you figure out which brick to ram your cranium into so it will trigger the secret door. Just go play a game that has the door open to begin with and doesn't require mandatory chores and frustration to get it open.
