Enter room, doors close, kill anything that isn't you, continue (just be careful to step on the trigger, or you can get stuck). The only way you could get the idea to compare this game to the Id-Engine ones is if you haven't played either... The levels are pretty fun, except for the problems with the triggers, and enemies on high ledges or towers that have the tendency to stop attacking resulting in a game of hide and seek to progress. But the bosses...are random, cheapshotty garbage with awful hitboxes. Their difficulty being all over the place isn't helping, either. Worst example is the 4th boss, which has unavoidable falling damage on every transition, climaxing in the last one that will kill you at 100 HP and 60+ armour (when playing on nightmare at least), unless you happen to stand in the correct spot to land on a pillar. Which you can't see until you fall, and then it's too late.
The game itself is a great "Soulslike" in a sci-fi setting with exo-rigs instead of armor, just like the first one, while improving on nearly everything. If you like those kind of games, buy it. I didn't have any crashes in 50h+, but the game tends to freeze for 2-4 Seconds on the first few dismemberments after entering a new zone. ...although... The worst enemy by far in this game is the camera. When you have a target locked and there is a hint of a wall in a 5 km radius, you won't be able to see anything. But the wall. No boss, no jump, no group of enemies is responsible for more of my deaths. ..and the directional blocking. The system by itself works fine, once you got the timings down. The problem is the controlsceme, at least on XBox controllers: You block by holding LB and then moving the right stick at the correct time in the correct direction....the right stick also moves the camera when unlocked, chooses your targeted bodypart when locked, and pressing it unlocks. Meaning when you block with gusto you are very likely to change your targeted limb or even lose your lock completely and spin the camera satan knows where.
1. The controls are sluggish and awful 2. You can softlock the game within the first 5 min of playing (you can enter an area you won't be able leave without abilities you'll get later, which of course I did) 3. You lose a lot of your collected curreny on touching one of the weird hitboxes of things that can hurt you, dropping and pretty much losing it since your character is too slow to pick it all up before it vanishes 4. It crashes quite frequently 5. That stone golem thing in the gif of the game description above? I have no idea how you are supposed to damage it. I mean I *did* damage it, but I have no idea of *how* I did that. The sword can get stuck on it, it can go through it...and sometimes it takes damage, sometimes it doesn't. There is no meaningful hit-feedback. Luckily I got it for free, id be pretty pissed otherwiese.
It's a nice little Metroidvania game, the atmosphere fits and the art design is pretty....but it lacks polish, mainly in the combat and balancing department. You get active and passive skills, 99% of the former are useless 100% of the time. The offensive ones do way too little damage to be worthwhile using instead of just hitting enemies, have a set amount of charges, and the particles produce a lot of visual clutter obscuring your view-> you get hit -> you die. Cleansing status effects is worthless, since you never actually get any. That leaves healing, and passive skills. Sometimes there are enemies mixed in that just seem to have about 20 times (no joke) the hp of the one next to it of the same type. Combat...well, parry feels odd. It's quick by itself, the window is very short, and canceling attacks into a successful parry sometimes works, and sometimes it doesn't. Jump+parry is a lot easier to land. Pretty often the animations don't really line up with what is actually happening. You can attempt a parry, get no visual feedback, but take no damage and the attack just passes through you (on parryable attacks). You can stunlock enemies...and suddendly die out of nowhere because the enemy decided to attack you while visibly still being stunned (remember, you take a lot more damage when hit while attacking). Bosses are pretty easy, except for them being HP-sponges and killing you in 1-2 hits. You get rewards for killing them flawlessly, at least. You have stats, but you have no real way of influencing them except for leveling up and a couple(I think?) of weak buff skills, so they might as well not be there. There is also hardly any equipment to be found, and some items just seem to land in your inventory without ever being of any use. This, together with the rather short length and some characters just being there leaves you wondering if the game got cut short for release. You get your money's worth, but I wouldn't mind paying more for more game and more polish
It's pretty much like the frist one, some polish here and there and a couple of QQL changes...and the jumping controls are still as infuriating as ever. Especially with an XBox-Controller. The d-pad isn't used at all, literally. You can't even rebind it.
The story(ies), the humor, the gameplay..it's all pretty damn good. But there are two glaring issues: The loading times and the overall performance. The loading times are abysmal. Not just a bit, we are talking PS3-Bloodborne-Tier. The game is very stylised, uses the UE4...yet it runs worse than bloody Witcher 3. Without the technical issues id give 5 stars with no hesitation what so ever.
The voiceacting and the presentation are decent. Everything else ? Well.....let's say Im glad I didn't have to pay for it. It has everything you like: Infuriating controls, a protagonist with the agility of a (drunken)freeclimber who can't swim, escort missions with instantdeaths and a hilariously corny story with a "twist" ending. It's also incredibly short. GoGGalaxy clocks me at 1h 10min, but I think it was double that at least. Imagine it's 1992 and you are playing the Flashback demo again. And only the demo.
The game has a beautiful handdrawn style, the music fits the theme....but there isn't really much to do. It's more of a meditative journey than a game. Unless you fight one of the bosses, then it gets frustrating. The controls are too stiff, the hitboxes are wonky, and there isn't any mechanic in place that keeps bosses from using combinations of their skills that will damage you no matter what. It's more a question of luck than skill.
Like others have said, it's an semi-open world western style ARPG with a lot to do, an interesting pawn system and a story that starts out decent...and goes full JRPG by the end. The good parts have been highlighted by enough ppl already, so I'll go for the nasty bits: - it's a console port with every line of it's code. The menues are a pain to explore, there are hardly any hotkeys, no mousewheel support, save->alt+f4 is about 30 seconds faster than trying to quit the game regularly,.......etc. - Hardly any way to command your party/pawns. And they are as dumb as a sack of bricks. You can set a basic behaviour through an unneccessarily convoluted process, and can tell them to go, come or help (not actually sure what that does, maybe focus ?). No "wait", no "heal me", no nothing. They love to keep standing in telegraphed attacks, try to cast right next to the boss. run away from goblins to cast. -The later bosses (post-dragon everfall and bitterblack) are first and foremost gear and consumeable checks. Your dmg stat is too low ? You deal no damage. Literally. Bosses have weakpoints and are said to need different tactics to kill. But they do a lot of random bullshit which can cause you to not being able to do anything for minutes, except for reviving the brainless pawns. Even worse if you had the bright idea of playing a pure melee char. You can be lucky and climb the boss first try and stab it to 30% HP in one go....or you get tossed off every 2 seconds without being able to achieve anything. Oh, and bring health/stamina pots. Lot's of em. And/Or farm a shitlaod of wakestones and faceroll everything. - Big bosses, climbing and the camera are natural enemies. Maybe it works better with a controller, but unless the boss stands still the char sometimes randomly changes directions while climbing when you keep a button pressed. And that's only if you can actually see anything, because the camera loves to stay on the other side of the boss.
Nothing of this game feels like it was released in 2012, and mostly for the bad. Which is pretty sad, since the world is well fleshed out, the characters have a lot to say (that's an understatement) and the story might get interesting. But most people won't be masochistic enough to suffer through the clunky interface interactions, awful combat and nonexisting enemy balance. And you will have to deal with a lot of enemies (some even respawn). Your weapons can break after 3 hits, spiders in one of the first zones can poison you for 5 minutes, you will spend most of the time filling your inventory with potions (one at a time, health, stamina and mana), the exp enemies give when killed have absolutely no relation to their difficulty, when you run out of stamina it lowers your overall speed....it's tedious as hell.
