I desperately want to be able to recommend this game, I really, really do. I enjoyed the overwhelming majority of my playtime with this experience. The writing was nice, the characters were charming, the hatchlings make cute sounds, the platforming and movement is largely on point barring a few minor nitpicks about going down when swimming and how gliding requires three taps instead of automatically transitioning at the apex of a double jump, though that last one may have been a conscious decision due to fight design. The combat flow is fairly nice and intuitive, and most things you need to know are right there in the manual inside the game.
The different alignments and their powers are a good and nicely cinematic selection that look good, and are easy to use. Hotswapping takes some getting used to and it could be better served being a radial menu since you're going to have to take your thumb off the stick to swap anyway, and other functions would be mapped to the d-pad instead.
The atmosphere of the game was great, some of the map design doesn't have the best flowthrough and I got a little bit lost at times, but it felt like a natural consequence of overdevelopment, of growing beyond an initial planned scope and being hemmed in by earlier decisions, instead of an ineptitude in design. The game is fun to run through and explore, the puzzles are also fun and pretty much all doable with a bit of practice.
But then we get to the combat, which is where I feel like experience falls completely apart. For starters, enemies in the game are a bit spongey outside of your strongest tools, the last of which you have to go a fair bit out of your way to get, but the game does helpfully show you it's there somewhere. This spongeyness is aggressively amplified for bosses, which wouldn't be AS bad if some of them didn't also have arbitrary shields on top of it. For the smaller bosses, this is somewhat negligible. They by design appear to be intended to be fought in a way that makes the fight a battle of attrition, where you're healing through the environmental and incoming damage to wear them down. This doesn't feel super great, but it's definitely doable. Potentially you could end those fights faster by hotswapping between elements and playing high risk, high reward, but in practice that turned out to be much less reliable due to the constant unavoidable damage ticks.
The second big issue is that the bosses hit really, REALLY hard. The weakest attacks of the game's biggest bosses feel like they do, at minimum, a quarter of your HP. This may not be the case, but it's how it feels. This is fine to an extent, because you are given a functional healing tool in passive regeneration and an active healing skill in that element, and in the general content, the smaller bosses, and earlier phases of big bosses, are not so frenetic as to make those tools useless. However, the game's big bosses will hit you for roughly what it heals, and in the later phases, finding space to use your heal is extraordinarily difficult or outright impossible, depending on the situation you find yourself in.
This leads to the third big issue with the game's combat, which is the game introducing things that it then makes pointless or actively detrimental. For example, the game introduces a parry mechanic. This parry, rightly, takes none of your energy meter to use, which was a very good decision on the part of the developer, and has a fairly generous window for use. I applaud both of these decisions. This is where the good decisions stop, however. Thee parry returns a portion of the damage that would have been dealt to you, to the enemy, which in most cases (barring reflected arrows from foes, which work really well) is significantly less than you could do by using other abilities. In addition, if what you are parrying is a melee strike, you appear to be limited to a damage radius around your character. Some enemies have dashes that will attack you and then put them out of your range in the same movement, and of the game's late bosses one is so big that they will be able to melee attack you from well out of damage range for the skill. When you do successfully parry on a boss, the gross discrepancy between their health pool and yours, as well as returning only a portion of the damager, makes parry borderline useless in implementation in boss fights and an actively detrimental use of time at worst because it requires you to lock in place for little to no benefit.
Water grants you a shield that renders you totally immune to a single hit, without the need for timing like the parry. So does the game make use of this by giving you a huge, single, fully telegraphed, otherwise unavoidable or difficult to dodge boss attack? So that you can use the shield as a tool to keep damage uptime? No. It does not. In the heated phases, phases where you really want to be able to ignore a hit, there are sometimes dozens of attacks on the field at once, and when there aren't, they are coming out in fairly rapid succession. In fact, the only instances of a slow, highly telegraphed attack in the game result in a pool that restricts and does multiple hits, or a multihit blast of nearly instant death that is countered with environmental tools, and the boss is invulnerable for the charge of.
Nature grants you entangling thorns to slow enemies down, but the duration is so low that in the hectic later stages o boss fights where you REALLY want the crowd control so you can focus on the boss, you're much better served just using damaging skills instead.
Ice has a similar problem. It allows you to eventually freeze enemies, locking them in place and making them take increased damage. The keyword here is "eventually". The energy and time expenditure required to freeze enemies is so prohibitive that it's not viable in boss fights for adds at all, and it leaves you with so little bar afterward that you can't properly capitalize on it anyway, and have to just melee them instead to rebuild meter.
Wind allows you to juggle and keep enemies juggled, but the combat is so stiff and lacking in apparent benefits to aerial combos that it's both difficult to take advantage of the state and I couldn't really tell what the benefits of doing so were in the first place. To wind's credit the Aerial juggling is the most effective crowd control in the game, but it does not work on all mobs, again making it of dubious use in boss fights.
None of these three states appear to have any effect on bosses, at all.
The game includes a dodge, and I don't know if I missed a point in the game where the dodge was faster than running, but by the end of the game, when I had upgrades, it appeared to be exactly the same speed as just triggering sprint. I could not make heads or tails of whether it awarded iframes or not, but even if it does, having the dodge be the same apparent movement speed as your run just feels bad when you can move at run speed the whole encounter, and dodging otherwise eats your stamina bar.
Aerial specials can be nice. Nature's Aerial tail strike for example, carried me through certain early boss fights, and I like the variety, however, if you're going to be running a combo system with multiple elements, you would be served to put in some kind of chaining system for aerial specials, either allowing them to be used consecutively without having to jump again, or allowing you to set a sequence of them that will swap from one element to another when used, to use another synergistic skill.
Many of the game's attacks are, on their own, neat and fun to use, but they don't seem to work well together or consider the greater whole. These mechanics should work together to improve the experience. The problem with ice's low damage output and high expense could be removed by adding a synergy with water. Water attacks for example could make enemies wet, which could make them then freeze instantly. There is so much missed opportunity.
