tl;dr: Decent enough to buy on sale, but expect a rather frustrating game. This is a short, futuristic RPG that takes many gameplay elements from Dark Souls. While it has some cool ideas and twists to those gameplay elements, it often ends up being a rather frustrating experience. The game reminded me a lot of Hyper Light Drifter, without the speed, satisfying combat and cool music. By far the biggest shortcoming is the stamina system. Running, dashing, blocking and attacking all cost stamina. The amount it costs is rather excessive, however, which means that the majority of the time you can perform any actions and are just waiting for the stamina to recover. This on its own isn't so bad, but there is also a stunning mechanism attached to the stamina bar. If an enemy's stamina is nearly empty, you can dash into them and stun then. If their stamina isn't low enough, you stun yourself instead. Overall, getting stunned by enemies happens far too frequently, and typically results in instant death, due to the stun animation's absurd length. The isometric view often backfires, and you will get hit and stunned unexpectedly many times, often dying in the process. If your character dies, you drop all your experience points and respawn at the last checkpoint, similar to the bonfire system of Souls games. You are, however, forced to fight many or all of the enemies along the way, rather than being able to run straight to your corpse. This is tedious and gets annoying very fast when you die during the sometimes tough bossfights. The storytelling/exposition is minimal, and presents more of a setting rather than an actual story. Consequently, you're hardly given any reason for moving through the areas and killing the bosses. The ending was abrupt and came out of nowhere. I frankly have no idea why the final boss was who he was. Overall, it took me around 6 hours to reach the end, a big part of which was spent backtracking through what I'm guessing is the third area.
After hearing so many horrible things about Daikatana, I figured I'd give it out for a spin myself to see what it's like. I was very pleasantly surprised by it. One major thing to note for this game is that it takes a while for the player to get good at the game's mechanics, and that it's not unlikely that you won't have a great time at first. Most people shove the game aside and never try to learn how, for instance, the AI actually works or how to progress through areas properly. The game is not easy, and you can expect it to kick your ass in a bunch of places, but once you get better at it you'll start appreciating that a lot more. A lot of the weird and quirky design elements end up being good fun. That's not to say that the game is flawless: Some of the puzzles can be far fetched; the Quake 2 engine makes movement very weird; AI companions can be pretty slow sometimes. If you learn how to work around those issues, you'll have a really cool game that simply suffered from being overhyped back when it was released. Definitely worth trying out!
This game does almost everything right. With access to a handful of ships, and numerous weapon combinations, there are plenty of ways to play through missions, though the titular Strike Suit generally proves to be the most enjoyable one. The scale of battle is vast and awe inspiring. The game can be very challenging at times and sometimes seem plain unfair, but, unless you're a perfectionist, it never really gets frustrating. I'd recommend it to anyone, based on the excellent gameplay, and gorgeous visuals.
