The game looks beautiful and plays in a nordish mythology setting. In the beginning I tried the "give me a challange" difficulty but that was way to hard so I changed to "balanced". At the beginning I tried the gamepad but switched to keyboard and mouse. It's way easier like that. After about half the game the combat is getting easier with all the upgrades one can craft/buy/find. For me the combat felt a little bit unbalanced because it was much harder at the beginning than the end. I liked the alternating of combat and storytelling. There is no need for grinding but if the main story is too difficult, you can do some side storys to get some more perks. If one wants real combat challenges there are the valkyrs. There is even a "new game+" mode for more challanges. I had some severe frame drops but my hardware is way better than this game demands.
The game starts without explaining anything in details. You collect stuff you first don't know what they are but when you collect enough of it you see that you get more health or more energy or you can buy abilities with them. There is also no hints at the beginning on how to move or what the mission is. This is irritating at first but creates a strange mysterious feeling that is intensified because no one is talking to you in a comprehensible language but just sounds. The game wants you to be curious and looking for hints on where to proceed. To be fair you can easily spot the things the game wants from you if you are no beginner in video games. The fighting feels good and is not too complicated. Moving and jumping feel good but sometimes it's not working as expected because there is some invisible object or something blocking. The world looks beautiful as can be seen on the screenshots. It's somewhat a mix between tech-green-spiritual-wooden objects. If you don't like to explore and find out for yourself what is going on, this game may not be yours. Because there is not much explaining on what you have to do and how you have to do it, it is not for beginners that want guidelines.
As many other already mentioned it isn't the same system as in the previous game with "gems" and too much weapons but with a handful of them and a katana. The gore level isn't that of the previous one but still good. Other think this game is "on rails" and not open enough. I really liked it to be that way because it's pure fun being routed through the levels as the story proceeds. If there is any "open worldish" in it, the games tend to be filled with time filler. Maybe that's why this game is thought of to be too short. The previous game had a lot of "time fillers" and additional levels for grinding for stuff. I liked it to not grind for stuff and just enjoy the beautiful levels and music. The story is somewhat cliche with being lied to and finally "all work togehter as team" and then happy end. But it's ok imho.
pro: - beautiful graphics - beautiful worlds - nice music - comic look con: - Hated to search the light seeds. Those things have to be collected after finishing a boss in the same world you already have gone to get to the boss. It's just a time waster for me and adds no additional fun for me. - Quite easy. One has to press the jump button at a rightish moment and that is enough for the most part. - Don't like it when the girl has to be piggybacked when climbing on a vine. She can save me from any abyss and death but she is unable to climb it herself or just fly besides me? And it destroys the fluidity of the movement when she climbs my back. - the controls feel a bit squishy when trying to go in the correct direction I get it that people love this game. I guess they like the graphics/sounds and the easy processing without any obstacles. If you also like to collect things without having problems with immensive backtracking this game is for you.
I liked the art of the game. The environment and with it the art changes in the other realm too. The audio is encouraging. Movement is smooth and makes fun. Learning the different skills isn't that hard. For me the difficulty on normal mode was quite ok and not that furstrating. Had to practice some jumps about thirty times but it was not all the time. I liked the mix of combat and platformer. Guess this was my first metroidvania style game and I enjoyed it.
Thank god some users pointed out, that there is an unofficial patch 1.3. This is a great improvement. I liked it somehow, this old school shooter. The only real pain are those damn sidekicks that always get stuck and are just plain pain in the ass. It is true that chapter 1 isn't that good but after that it is quite ok and it is really weird with all those different time lines and different weapons in all those time lines. Follow this introduction https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=282094762 and you can have a good time with it. Had about 26 hours fun with it.
As the video trailer shows the game looks just very good and the switching between the worlds is nice. I liked the controls and it makes the game just flow. It was challanging and I had fun with improving with every retry. I didn't like to collect those damn gems to proceed any further, so I just played it on easy mode, where it is not neccessary to have those gems to proceed. It would have been great to have it challanging but without collecting gems. Otherwise it was about 10 hours of platforming fun for me :-)
