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Humanities Legend: Dark Horizon is a substantial improvement upon the developer's first game (which I reviewed [url=https://steamcommunity.com/id/jarlfrank/recommended/1834760]here[/url]), but still very janky so I'll give the same verdict as I did with its predecessor: get this if you like janky solo dev projects that show promise, stay away if you want a polished product made by professionals.
The combat is similar to the first game, but has had a couple of improvements. Parrying no longer works by holding a key down, but pressing it once, so you always have to time your parries. Enemies have two types of heavy attacks, vertical and horizontal, that have to be dodged or jumped over respectively. It's a simple system, but I found the combat mechanics engaging enough to keep me interested until the end.
Unlike the first game, you now gain experience for every slain enemy, and enemies respawn if you die, bringing it much closer to the soulslike formula. You don't lose anything on death, though, which I appreciate - I never liked corpse runs in soulslikes. Experience can be invested in health, damage, and mana. I found damage to be the most powerful attribute, since it also increases the poise damage you do to enemies, allowing you to knock them down much more easily. I invested all my experience points into damage, which made the game a little too easy towards the end. Dealing high damage is more important in this game than being able to tank it.
While the first game had a couple of challenging bosses, particularly the end boss, I found the ones in this game much easier. There was only one boss I had to attempt multiple times, all the others fell at the first or second attempt. Their attacks are well telegraphed and none of them do anything particularly nasty, unlike the final boss of the first game. So if you play this genre for the bosses, you'll be disappointed.
The exploration, however, is pretty solid. The game's structure is more open than its predecessor's. You progress through a series of hubs, each with a couple of villages and areas of wilderness to explore. Each of these hubs has a couple of corrupted zones which you need to clear by either killing all enemies in the vicinity or eliminating so-called galls. After clearing all these zones in a hub, the area boss will spawn and you can go fight it. After defeating the boss, you can progress to the next hub.
While there is no map, navigation is helped by glowing pillars of light. Dark purple light shows where the corruption and the bosses are, while white pillars of light show you where the next hub is. Those provide all the guidance you need, and are much more immersive than quest markers or an automap. I quite liked the exploration in this game, and the developer's level design skills have clearly improved compared to the first game. It's still amateurish, of course - particularly the dungeons - but you can see what he's trying to go for, and the world is fun to explore. While some areas feel a little repetitive, the game is short enough that it never becomes a problem.
The game has full day and night cycles, which look quite beautiful, but the nights are so dark you can barely see, which makes the cycles more annoying than cool. But you can rest at this game's equivalent of bonfires and advance the time of day to morning, noon, evening, or midnight, so it's not a big issue. Visually, I particularly liked the sunsets, and the darkness of night can actually be useful in showing you where to go, as the guiding pillars of light are far more visible against the dark night sky.
Speaking of graphics, one major issue the game has is that it makes my PC's fans spin unlike any other. I have a pretty powerful machine with an AMD RX 7900 XT, and a Ryzen 9 CPU, while playing on an old 1080p monitor at 60 FPS. With that setup, I can play any modern AAA game at max settings including raytracing without the PC breaking a sweat. This game uses Unreal Engine 5 and is quite badly optimized, as it makes my PC run hotter than far prettier games. After a little tinkering with the graphics settings, I figured that the problem was most likely with the density of grass on the ground. I've never seen a game with that much animated grass before! The entire ground is covered with it, which requires a ridiculous amount of hardware power to render. Fortunately, you can turn the vegetation detail down in the settings menu, so it's not too big an issue, but considering the optimization of this game, I wouldn't recommend it to people with weaker PCs.
One thing I complained about in the first game was that the help screen in the game menu only showed controller buttons. Well, that has been fixed - it also shows the keyboard controls now, which is greatly appreciated. QoL-wise, this game is a big improvement upon its predecessor.
Overall, I'd recommend this for people who enjoy soulslikes for the exploration, and who can stomach high amounts of jank. If jank and obvious signs of amateur work put you off, this isn't the game for you. I really like solo dev productions that show passion and effort, and Derek Tanis has some good ideas and is clearly trying to improve his game design with every new release, so I'm looking forward to what he's going to cook up next.
