ELDERBORN Metal AF Edition

A really solid game, well worth its time and price! Elderborn's design does a good job of hitting that difficulty curve where new enemies sometimes seem like irritating menaces until you learn the proper tools and movements to deal with them, after which any single enemy becomes a breeze to dispatch. Due to there being only two boss fights (the first of which is solid and the second of which is awesome), it mainly relies on varied combinations of terrain, enemy variety, and enemy placement to bring new challenges. Barring maybe one small section in a single building, I never really felt like it was throwing the same fight at me across its seven and a half hour length. None of this would matter if the combat wasn't fun, but by the end of the game I still wasn't tired of the slo-mo effect that sometimes plays when landing skull-crushing headshots or decapitations. A surprising number of weapons in the arsenal helps to encourage experimentation and exploration of different playstyles, pretty much all of which work if you learn how to commit to them without dropping your defense. Plus, the zero-cooldown dash move combined with a couple of unlockable abilities gives fights a constant rhythm and motion that can kill you in about two seconds at any given time, but also allows you to pull off some Doom 2016-ish push-forward-combat massacres if you play it smart. As an added bonus, the metal-themed soundtrack starts good and only gets better as the game goes on. The Metal AF edition is worth it for the downloadable OST alone. As for flaws: the middle section of the game could have used more varied color pallettes and visuals in its environments, the voice acting is on the mediocre side, and much of the lore and flavor text could have perhaps used some editing to make them a bit less generic and more interesting. All of these are more nitpicks than downfalls, but they do add up to diminish the presentation. Overall, however, I easily recommend this to anyone interested.

If you have unlimited time and feel like dying repeatedly then you might like this. If you actually just want to play a game and have fun this isn't the game. The game stops being fun at the first boss. The only way to beat him is by using sickles and parrying his attacks, the only way you can parry attacks in this game is if you know exactly when they are going to land an attack. They did everything they could to make awkward weird robotic movements to enemies just to make it harder to read. It's illogical and not fun. Imagine swinging a baseball bat and halfway through your swing you're just holding it and 'charging up' or some nonsense. The only purpose is to be aggravating to the player having to have so many unique awkward 'reads' to be able to parry. The second act is pure frustration. The recovery time for missed parry is far too great, it's like your character all of a sudden is in mud and can't parry in quick succession if you fail your initial. Every enemy has weird wind ups that feels impossible to parry. Mages that spam fireballs at you, that you have to use a block weapon to walk towards, and then when you get in melee range they send you flying through the air to your death. I could write about all this frustration for an hour. The game allows remapping, but interact is "Hold E". Why do I have to hold a key down to do what I want it to do? I'm not on a console with limited buttons, and you need to expand my button by adding idiotic holding. The worst offense is when you're already pissed off, trying to recover your essence (you drop all of your progress every time you die, and you have to find it and pick it up and all monsters respawn when you die). But you have to hold E and wait for it to charge and pick up, all while enemies are trying to kill you again. You don't have to 'charge up' to pick up essense that drops so it's completely asinine to pick up yours, the purpose is to frustrate the player and nothing else.