I checked out the demo today. Was looking forward to this game, but I don’t understand what anyone has said about the game so far. It did not have a good first impression. Nonsense story/characters aside, the gameplay hasn’t won me over. First off, it just puts you right into battle and throws shitty Monster Hunter tutorial windows at you. Look at these bars, do the thing, press the button - good? Great now go kill Chaos.
Maybe it’s just me, but this is not like a souls game at all. I can barely tell what the hell is going on. There is very little on boarding and it’s not clear what I should be doing in combat aside from spamming hack and slash style moves in between enemy attack patterns. The game makes you want to break enemy stances but you are given almost no MP to actually do it. I usually end up killing enemies like bombs and skeletons well before their guard is broken. If your guard is broken or you die, your MP is reduced which makes it even harder to keep the pressure. Apparently there is also job switching in combat, but it’s not really clear why you would bother aside from switching to spells here and there. There’s obviously some kind of intent with all of this junk, but it just gives me the same impression Doom Eternal did: a list a million lines long saying when X happens, do Y to counter it.
I just beat Chaos Advent after a dozen tries on Action (because why name a game’s difficulty in a straightforward way when you can confuse them!). Phase 1 had a fun rhythm where dodges and parries could work, but phase 2 just seemed broken. No way to dodge the AOE effects and parrying all the hits gets your guard broken and doesn’t restore nearly enough MP to make use of your abilities. My team did most of the work in the end.
Worst of all is the loot and job system. It’s all incomprehensible nonsense. The equipment bonuses seem so insignificant and yet they drop a metric shit ton on you constantly. Same parts but with different levels, sometimes different effects or bonuses. Why?? I just auto-optimize every time because it’s way too much and almost all of its trash.
I think this is a great idea of a game and I want to love it badly, can someone address any of these points and explain to me why I’m getting the wrong impression? I have played countless souls and action games, this seems to be something entirely different and I just am not understanding.
www.siliconera.com
www.gematsu.com
