A really solid game, well worth its time and price! Elderborn's design does a good job of hitting that difficulty curve where new enemies sometimes seem like irritating menaces until you learn the proper tools and movements to deal with them, after which any single enemy becomes a breeze to dispatch. Due to there being only two boss fights (the first of which is solid and the second of which is awesome), it mainly relies on varied combinations of terrain, enemy variety, and enemy placement to bring new challenges. Barring maybe one small section in a single building, I never really felt like it was throwing the same fight at me across its seven and a half hour length. None of this would matter if the combat wasn't fun, but by the end of the game I still wasn't tired of the slo-mo effect that sometimes plays when landing skull-crushing headshots or decapitations. A surprising number of weapons in the arsenal helps to encourage experimentation and exploration of different playstyles, pretty much all of which work if you learn how to commit to them without dropping your defense. Plus, the zero-cooldown dash move combined with a couple of unlockable abilities gives fights a constant rhythm and motion that can kill you in about two seconds at any given time, but also allows you to pull off some Doom 2016-ish push-forward-combat massacres if you play it smart. As an added bonus, the metal-themed soundtrack starts good and only gets better as the game goes on. The Metal AF edition is worth it for the downloadable OST alone. As for flaws: the middle section of the game could have used more varied color pallettes and visuals in its environments, the voice acting is on the mediocre side, and much of the lore and flavor text could have perhaps used some editing to make them a bit less generic and more interesting. All of these are more nitpicks than downfalls, but they do add up to diminish the presentation. Overall, however, I easily recommend this to anyone interested.
