2.5 hours played.
In short: 7 or 8/10
Longer version:
First impressions from the tutorial area. Metacritic score seems valid. That’s the short of it. It just looks bad, you get interrupted too much and the area feels cramped and is boring to be honest. I’m guessing they wanted to have an Oblivion-coming-out-of-the-caves moment. But that was a bad idea. It’s just a bad start really.
Once that ends though, after maybe an hour with character creation included, when you exit the tutorial area...
Then I’m really enjoying this!
Going by this small sample I would at the very lowest rate it 7/10 if I search for my inner crankiness.
But I would rate it 8/10 on a sunny day, like today.
Maybe it stumbles later on but so far I think it’s a lovely and unique action RPG that don’t take itself too seriously. I don’t know what to compare it with. It’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that while it still manage to feel fresh. Someone said it was as if Rare made an action RPG and I think that’s a nice summary. It’s not perfect gameplaywise but it’s definitely not bad and it just oozes with charm and it shows that the dev team has had fun creating it. And it looks absolutely gorgeous at times!
The controls with mouse and keyboard are too complicated for me. I’m twisting my fingers into a knot to reach all the buttons in the heat of the battle. So I went with a controller and then it’s smooth sailing. Feels snappy, lots of autoaim but it can probably be deactivated, I don’t mind it though, the fights are surpisingly long, regular enemies are way more complicated to beat than similar enemies in something like BOTW, you’re dodging, blocking, using melee, shooting, healing, using combos etc. I got stomped by a mini boss, that’s why I’m here now. Playing on hard.
Screens
Runs at 65-95fps at max graphics settings at 1080p on a 1080ti btw. Smooth as butter with gsync.