Wow. First of all, I love roguelikes, but this is just an utter clustertruck. In handles like any other spaceshooter if you were injecting horse tranquilizers in one arm and cocain in the other beforehand. It's way too fast to hit literally anything and I played a a lot of shooters. The tutorial is a lame joke, half of the stuff is not explained, and half of what is explained makes no sense (e.g. tutorial tells you to repair something although you don't have the resources). The game is just all over the place in terms of GUI, controls and general handling, I even fail to see why it is called roguelike, because it tries to hold your hand at every step of the way, but fails to do that even. It seems like the creators constantly kept betraying their intentions and as such this game has a massive identity crisis, as it tries to fit space rpg, roguelike (which it isn't) and shooter under one hood and consecuteviley does a sad and poor job of it. There are probably hundreds of samey space rpg shooters that do a better job in all terms and don't handle like ass. I got this for free because of the christmas sale but boy oh boy would I be angry if I payed almost 30 bucks for this trainwreck of good intentions. Altogether, a lot of parts of the game would separately be technically good, some even excellent, but the way they are bind together is just messy and uncreative and bad handling and poor gameplay are the results.
I played through this game a hundred times and was very happy to find it on GOG only to find out that the game is utter garbage in this version. Enemies can stunlock you alone, dodging avails nothing as in this version enemies turn with you while dodging (but ofc your character does not under the same circumstances...), blocking is simply useless because your dumb character does not do it, however even with the fastest styles fully upgraded your enemies can block at any given time. WTH? Then of course, after you figured out how to trick the system, you go through almost any confrontation with one hand down your pants, until you meet deamons. For some reason some total crackpot thought: Yeah, you know what? In this version we'll make them live solely on cocain and delete their weaknesses. So deamons still turn with you and are henceforth lightning fast and their strikes almost unavoidable. Their greatest weakness was being slow. Now you have a towering elephant deamon, with longer reach than yours, striking just as fast as the second fastest martial style, turning with your dodges, unable to being interrupted and all that on top of a bunch of other enemies. Good bloody job of ruining a game entirely. I am not sure if this is an issue with the GOG version, or with the latest version in general, but it's not like I could check if my version does not have the issue as it is broken. But the problems are with the version you can buy here at this point you are paying scraps for a bloody broken game.
Clunky, subpar controls with mechanics that go like this. Dodge, dodge, hit, repeat, repeat, repeat, accidently hit twice, die. Even the earliest enemy types can "stunlock" you, with no chance to dodge out. Not really a challenge, more a chore and tedious AF. Another game trying to be dark souls, doing the worst possible job so far.
I was really happy to see the game has been made available and even features a better resolution (press alt+R ingame) which is nice, certainly not necessary for GOG lovers, but still. What is completely annoying, however, the "options" are there just for show. You can try to redefine keys, but the game won't register 99% of them. You can try to shutdown the most annoying ingame music of all times, but even though the game shows it being turned of, it is just as loud and superfluous as it ever was. You have to select "yes" on the "invert mouse" option to actually NOT have an inverted mouse. All the "launch options" except for languages and "graphic settings" do literally nothing. A shame, I expected the game to receive a bit more love and attention, but then again I picked it up on sale and it runs. DK being an amazing game with almost every big language localisation provided, would be enough for 5/5, but given the "just for show" menus and options is -2 overall.
