Titan Souls

The overall game idea, the visuals and the design is good but the game is still flawed. The game challenge requires so much precision and quick reflexes. You cannot move while aiming. You can only guess your aiming direction. Why there is no Mouse and Keyboard control? And there is not really rewarding elements to keep playing. Nothing much to say about this.

The gameplay in Titan Souls turned out to be more fun than I expected. I only bought it to try it because of a 90% discount, and I was pleasantly surprised by it. The main loop of the game is killing the titular titans using only your one arrow that needs to be picked back up after every shot, with sprinting and dodge rolling mixed in. Each boss fight has a quirk or gimmick that is the key to beating it, which makes each fight less of a back and forth between attacking and defending (like you'd expect from a souls-like) and more like a puzzle requiring thinking and well-timed shots. Outside of the boss fights themselves, you have the overworld which you travel to find each boss; Sometimes hidden bosses too which are quite nice to find. All of that said, I might have had fewer positive feelings for this game if I hadn't bought it on sale because of how empty it feels. The gameplay is nice and rewarding, yes, but you have no context to what you're doing and why you're doing it. This makes the game feel void of a certain something that could make it a very memorable game. I feel like I'm killing these things because it's a game and that's what you do in it, and not because there's something bigger at play.

It's a Souls game. If you don't like dying, you're not going to like this. It's brutally hard, you will die, you will die a lot. It's a one-hit kill game. This is all about boss battles where you need to learn the weaknesses of otherwise brutally overpowered bosses. They kill you, you learn a tiny bit about their abilities, you try again. You learn something else, and die again. Eventually you learn enough to overcome them and defeat them. If anything, this is a more 'arcade' version of Souls. The bosses are easier, but you die easier too. Don't expect an ARPG. Don't expect Diablo: Pixel. Don't expect Zelda: Hard. Do expect Dark Souls: 8 Bit. Extremely recommended for Souls fans. Not recommended for others. Also, maybe y'all should git gud.

I had a lot of fun with this. You and the bosses each dying after a single hit made the game pretty intense.

Gotcha! I yelled in triump as I beat the incredibly exasperating boss in the room with destructible pillars. I had been chipping away at him for close to 45 minutes. And that's when I realized what my feelings are for this game. Titan Souls does provide the sense of triumph when defeating a particularly challenging boss, but the victories never feel that satisfying. The issue lies in the combat mechanics. The abilities of the protagonist are intentionally simple, but this results in the capacity to defeat the bosses often depending more on fortuitous geometry than raw skill on the part of the player. I think that a well designed game is a lot like a scientific theory. If the game's mechanics are well designed than once the player has developed sufficient skill, they should be able to reliably overcome the same challenge consistently. Naturally games have a bit of Chaos Theory in them, and results will never be 100% predictable, but if the mechanics are sound and the controls are tight, skilled players should be able to reliably best a completed challenge with relative ease. There is some of that in Titan Souls, and players can definitely get better, but the simplistic combat mechanics juxtaposed with bosses that often have far superior speed, and arena design that puts the player's movement acuity at a severe disadvantage, often results in a player's victory being one of more luck, than skill. Even when a player knows the bosses attack patterns, knows the correct sequence of moves to produce victory, the languid movement of the hero, and sluggishness of the controls, just results in a half hearted sense of accomplishment when you win. So, the core of the game, the boss battles, are a frustrating experience, because of a poverty in the central combat mechanics and sluggish controls. There can be satisfying victories, but far too often I find myself saying, "Phew. Guess I was lucky." Exploration is pleasant. Music is EXCELLENT. Buy on >50% sale.