Solid 3/5 Soulslike. Decent amount of playtime depending on your skill level, could be short or could be long. Lots of good ideas but lots of ideas with some poor implementation. Would still recommend especially if they manage to patch the shortcomings it had on release.
Good things I enjoyed were:
- The class system (Shells that you pick up during exploraton) and the distinct gameplay loop they incentivize you to do.
- The tarstones that change and augment how you play (equivalent to rings/accessories for Dark Souls), such as a tarstone that lets you hurl your battle axe/hammer at an enemy and send them flying or shooting an axe that spins in place and shreds anything that walks through it.
- The three types of blocking damage options (You can either choose to go with classic guard with perfect guards available, a risky parry but does more contribution to enemy's posture, or the harden ability that lets you freeze what you're doing without cancelling your attack animation; harden was my favorite)
- Not many weapons, but each have unique attack animations that feel satisfying to use, especially the Martyr's Blade.
- Map wasn't too big but had enough stuff jampacked in, so it being open world wasn't too intimidating for a person who doesn't want to slog through large sections of the map.
Bad things that made me lower it in score:
- Fast attacking weapons such as the axatana and axe and dagger just doing more damage than slow hitting weapons like the greatsword or hammer. You would think a slow hitting weapon with more commitment would do more damage, but it's not the case. You could argue it's because the slow hitting weapons stagger enemies easily, but that's not true. Even if I were to swing my great martyr's blade at some basic looking mobs, they would hyper armor straight through it with their 4-5 hit combos. And even if you did argue that it did more posture damage, it goes to my next point of bad things I dislike about the game.
- Riposte damage is terrible. I'm pretty sure its a bug on the damage you do when you break an enemy's posture, but it does so little damage in endgame that you're better off just still swinging with your weapon or using a tarstone ability. There's just no incentive to riposting an enemy, especially when the game throws it in your face to do it. (Albeit, the riposte animations are sick, so understandable if you just like seeing it for the sake of seeing it.)
- The game is extremely stingy on resources for upgrading your class/weapons/tarstones. You only get a finite amount of resources to upgrade your gear per new game. Specifically for shells, as you can refund upgrades to weapons but for some reason can't with classes (You're probably only going to be able to only max out 2-3 of the 8 classes the game offers you per run as long as you ensure you commit those resources to those specific classes).
Unless you're looking up which class/weapon suits you, you're going to end up upgrading a class/weapon you probably don't particularly like but feel that you have to to not getting destroyed by everything. Upgrading weapons also require money AND materials, and farming for money is such a pain unless you happen to also have Proxima as a shell.
- Levelling up tarstones is a terrible mechanic. Tarstones have 3 levels and every tarstone can be upgraded to level 2 for a small amount of coin and rewards you with a material that you need to upgrade a single tarstone to level 3. I get the idea that they want players trying out different tarstones and finding out that new tarstone might be the gamechanger to their build. But in reality, a player is going to end up going through the game with half of their build missing because they need more mats to upgrade their ACTUAL tarstones to level 3.
- Some dungeons just feel like they shouldn't even exist and the rewards should have just been put in the overworld (especially in the southern half of the map).
- Night mode (difficulty modifier) only offering a couple of exclusive dungeons and a night merchant is not a good enough incentive to making the game harder. The xp gain is not even much of an upgrade.
- Some enemies/bosses having non-telegraphed attacks that come out extremely fast and do punishing amounts of damage. Or some enemies straight teleporting to you with their attacks even though they're quite a distance from you.
- Some weapons or tarstone abilities have inconsistent tracking
