Death's Gambit: Afterlife

I've played a lot of metroidvanias and souls' like games and this game is pretty close to the worst of them. What started out as an experience I wanted to love, quickly devolved into a boring, painful slog. How many years did this game spend in developement? Like 3 or 4? That is more than enough time to craft a well made game and yet, I'm left with the feeling the devs had no idea what they were doing, and the entire game feels incredibly unfinished. This is seriously the most unpolished game I may have ever played. There is no hit detection, combat feels weightless and as if your character is made of paper. The enemies are unbalanced with some being overpowered to the point of absurdity. The boss fights are mostly bland, unfair and uninspired. They essentially took the worst elements of other souls likes and weaponized them against the joy of gameplay. Replaying bosses on heroic mode just turns them into godless killing machines who summon reinforcements until the screen is so full of traps and gank squads that you can't even move, much less strategize.The stamina mechanic is broken beyond repair, you can do like 1 or 2 actions before you sit there like a loaf and get 90 percent of your health dropped in a single second. The ablilties take what seems like an eternity to wind up, meanwhile enemies and bosses have unlimited stamina and just spam the same cheap attacks until you die. I feel like the developers made the game with the "Dark Souls is so haaaaaaaard!" mentality at the sacrifice of everything that makes those games great. The game is also buggy as all hell, did they even have testers? Why wasn't this released in early access? It would have greatly helped. Honestly, just go buy Salt and Sanctuary if you want 2D dark souls. That game has everything this pretender doesn't. P.S: The developers are also basically telling reviewers on steam to "git gud." They seem arrogant and I wouldn't give them my money.

nice game, but there's a major game speed bug windowed -- too slow, fullscreen -- too fast windows 10 64 bit

This game blew me away. It starts out slow with you learning the combat and at first it may feel clunky or slow, but as you grow accustomed to it rolling, dodging and counter attacking will become second nature, and they will need to be because this game is tough, and you will die, a lot. The enemy design is varied and unique, the world is well connected and has enough secrets to keep you searching everywhere, and the bosses are incredible. Seriously these bosses are just absolutely amazing, fun, varied, exciting and hard. Brutally hard. There are also a few curveballs and unique twists throughout that are best experienced blind. This game will not be for everyone however. Some people may not be a fan of the combat, some people may not like the design, but I think everyone should look into this game and if you are interested give it a go.

When I first played this, I didn't know what to expect. I wasn't really a fan of Dark Souls and Bloodborne left a bad taste in my mouth. But then someone told about this wonderfuly dark Metroidvania. What interest me the most was the story. You play as a young man named Sorun. A dead soldier ressurected by death to search for his mother. Good writing and voice acting. A lot of the characters seemed interesting, each of them having their own purpose to as to why they advance on Caer Sorai. As far as mechanics, it is a bit grindy. I played as a Wizard and was kind of disappointed how many times I had to stop and grind. However, there is one aspect of this game that I cannot deny was truly beautiful: the music. From the moment you walked into Sancturary, to the moment where you face the final boss, you are caress with a quite lovely ensemble of sounds and instruments. All together, 4.5/10.

[For anyone curious, I'm playing this on a 2008 unibody Macbook Pro with a 2.66 Ghz Core 2 Duo processor, GeForce 9600M GT and 4 gigs of RAM running Windows 7. I can't run it in 1440 x 900 resolution, but it plays fairly well in windowed mode at lower resolutions. I'm pretty happy that it even runs at a playable framerate on this old a laptop.] I'm having fun playing this game so far. The graphics look great and the character design can be very interesting. Level design has been good so far too- clearly a lot of work went into designing this game. One thing that stands out as somewhat strange, however, is the orchestral soundtrack which is certainly beautiful but doesn't quite fit the tone of the visuals and Death being there and all that stuff. The music feels like something you'd expect while exploring the beautiful vistas of Skyrim or something. As far as gameplay and balance goes, I haven't played enough to be able to say for sure, but the most important thing is that it has kept my interest, it's fun, and there's some challenge to it. So far so good. To me, the most important thing is that I'm having fun while playing a game, and so far I definitely am. I do wish there was an option to use PS3 or PS4 buttons for the interface instead of Xbox, because I play with a DS3. Salt and Sanctuary has this and it's very much appreciated. Overall, great job devs. This is the first game I've reviewed on GoG or Steam because it's the first time I've bought a game this close to launch (no one needs to hear my opinion about The Witcher 3 in 2018).