Morbid: The Lords of Ire

good mechanics, not big on souls-like games but enjoyed this feels a bit unfinished though, like the developer ran out of money or something

Morbid: The Lords of Ire is not difficult. It is simply tedious. Unfortunately, I could not finish this game and this is the very first souls-like game I drop. I tried to love it, but it kept throwing bullsh*t back at me. The biggest problem with the combat is that parrying is not just one option, it feels like it is the only option that actually matters. Normal attacks do pathetic damage, even after upgrading your weapon, while parries and ripostes do the real work. As a result, most fights quickly become the same repetitive loop: wait for an attack, parry, punish, repeat. This becomes especially noticeable with bosses and minibosses. Once you understand their very limited move sets, there is almost no challenge left. You are not learning complex patterns, adapting your build or looking for different openings; you are simply performing the same parry dozens of times until their oversized health bar finally disappears. I defeated the first boss on my second serious attempt without even using a heal, simply by parrying over and over again. It was not satisfying, it was boring AF. Progression is somehow even worse. Enemies give very little XP, gaining a single point takes far too long, and those individual points barely feel meaningful. The card system offers very little excitement or build variety, and after reaching the end of the second area I still felt almost identical to how I did at the beginning of the game. I thought weapon upgrades would at least provide some sense of progression, but my weapon reached its upgrade limit ridiculously early while its normal damage still felt terrible. Meanwhile enemies just became tankier, meaning the solution was not to improve my character or change my build, but simply to parry them more times. The final straw was discovering that a boss in the second area is essentially a miniboss I had already fought, just with a larger health bar, and the reward for defeating encounters like these is often little more than a single progression point. That summarizes the entire experience for me: more HP, more parries, almost no meaningful reward. I bought it very cheaply, so I do not regret trying it, but after a couple of hours I had seen enough. TL;DR: Not difficult. Not rewarding. Just unnecessarily slow, time consuming and repetitive.