completing hollow knight reveals that the games "difficulty" is the only thing it has. strip that away and you are left with a monotonous 2d wanna be metroidvania, shamelessly copying the Souls formula, that just has good visuals. you see game development is not easy and takes time and skill, to deliver an enjoyable experience. the devs here simply showed me, they are inept of developing a good game. they went the easy road that every run of the mill indie dev goes: "make it hard and say its not for everyone ". miyazakis team ( responsible for the amazing souls/borne series ) are experienced devs with artistic vision and good knowledge of what they want to deliver. never have i felt dark souls 2, bloodborne or dark souls 3 were unfair games. in hollow knight i blame the game and the devs. from taking away quality of life features and forcing you to have buy them in game and use slots for it, to stupid enemy design that throw too many things at you to dodge. most of the time you will be spending tooling around, in the world, searching for the next stage to progress. then the next big time waster is the corpse running back to boss rooms. the actual gameplay here is actually lacking. its literally: - 60% of the time tooling around because you have no idea where you are - 30% corpse running because of bad enemy design and questionable platforming sequences - 10% fighting actual enemies...... do yourself a favour and dont support this kind of devs who have no idea, how to develop a good game.
for the time it released, it was great for about 2 hours until you saw through the repetitive nature of it. the whole game feels like a Tech demo for MMORPGs to showcase other devs what their engine is capable of. half of the game is you tooling around and the other half is, finishing the MMO-esque Quests, you get from 2 dimensional characters. there is no character progression, no change of gameplay which is baffling to me since the gameplay on itself, is pretty average at best, with the AI tooling around in the open mid firefight, waiting for you to free them from this terrible, terrible game. if you are really in desperate need of another monotonous, "UBICONIC" open world game, then wait for a sale. for anyone else who prefer quality over quantity, dont punish yourself by buying this game. just dont.
i really like the devs and really appreciate their effort in order to provide a good experience, sadly there are some issues with this game, that hamper the experience for me. let me explain it to you why: - Story: its a breeze of fresh air. the story is riveting and the main questline is actually pretty well written. - World: beautiful to look at. they nailed the presentation. the music and the visuals are amazing. - Quest design: the secondary quests and witcher contracts on the other hand are literally MMO level of quest design. "Few" of them are unique but good luck searching the unique ones that change the main story. i gave up on it after i saw, how lazily designed they were. thats a shame because those few of them are actually well written and interesting. - Gameplay: I finished this game a day ago and i have to say, that its probably one of the worst aspects of this game. even on the hardest difficulty, it offers no challenge. its way to easy and way too boring after the first 2 hours. Conclusion: Witcher 3 is a massive disappointment to me, after so much praise, i was left with a game that is at its core a glorified amalgam of every single mainstream open world action adventure game with a good story and extremely slow pacing. gameplay boils down to pressing two buttons, in some of the most boring fights you have seen from a game released in 2013. there are no gameplay changes when you wield new weapons, its all the same moveset, against an AI which is assassins creed 1 level of broken. the sheer amount of copy pasted content scattered throughout the entire map, reminds me of Ubisoft level of laziness. its basically a 20-30 hours game, padded a la dragon age inquisition. i had friends of mine who uninstalled the game before they even got to see the interesting plots in the story. i give it 2.5/5 its style over substance.
many ( even friends of mine ) say that this game is the best. i have to disagree. its mediocre tbh and doesnt do anything revolutionary. it doesnt add groundbreaking mechanics or fun and challenging gameplay. ( i played it on the hardest difficulty and killed a wraith 18 levels above me) it encourages dull grinding and busy work. same objective, slightly different looking characters and places. on top of that they implemented the Arkham-style detective mode. however the company behind this game are genius from a monetizing standpoint ofc.
