This game = Dark Souls' combat and item set + Hollow Knight lite platforming + Blasphemous wasteland walking simulator. The graphic's optimized. I'm running a 3050 and haven't come across any performance drop at max settings. The plot holds it's own but isn't as impressive as Dark Souls' The boss fights are fun and well telegraphed. Difficult bosses will have a checkpoint before their room. The game also saves your progress and location upon quitting, so there is no need to rush a checkpoint. The controls are crisp and responsive. This is important because the game rewards a wait-and-see style of play. It encourages you to observe the enemies and plan your journey across the level, which has secrets in every corner and a landmark that must be reached before the level map becomes available; and because the game's levels are so gigantic and convoluted, the first thing you do is look for it. (Individual levels are 2 times as big as the ones in Blasphemous or Hollow Knight.) Unfortunately, this contributes significantly to the mid-late game difficulty spike. After the Palace, environmental hazards, enemy lethality and platforming sections are ramped up significantly. The mobility items you've unlocked does little to help, since they are for access to previously locked off sections. You're still required to travel on foot and climb these 'shortcuts' over and over again. Combine this with the scarcity of fast travel nodes and the difficulty of unlocking teleport (a hidden bonus, not an obvious progression), and you have a recipe for wearing the player down through attrition. The fun that you once had on your first sorty through a map becomes unbearable tedium after the 3rd crossing. This kills the desire to do anything outside the main quest. For reference, I can do Hollow Knight's Path of Pain without taking hits, but walking through Grime's gauntlet over and over again is another level of design sadism. Take a long, hard look at a 100% walkthrough and decide.
This game is a relaxed take on ARPG with focus on summoning and horde composition. Item variety isn't really impressive (about 20 prefixes and suffixes - of which only half are useful). But that let's you come up with joke builds like spawning Liches from dead chickens. And you can craft game-breaking stuff about 3/5 of the way in. Maps doesn't really take long to clear and you don't have to return to base to sell loot. The horde mechanic is comparable to Grim Dawn's summoner classes with a buffed up unit count and no mana costs for summoning. Units are summoned from corpses of enemies and take up command slots, with powerful units taking more slots. You can send them to attack in the direction you're facing and recall them. There are no commands to stay put or guard. As for the combat, there isn't much depth. It all boils down to: Wreck tower --> Kill creeps--> Wreck their spawn. Rinse and repeat. Difficulty only comes when they out DPS you and destroy your horde faster than you can resummon. A "solo" build is also viable as there's a spell that grants player invulnerability, and perks that let's you heal/get damage buff from killed minions. The fun in base game comes from hotswapping builds with the loot you currently have. You can respec your horde at no cost. This game does have some surprises up it's sleeve. There are a few instances where you will have to change tactics and/or horde composition and work with the items you have. AOE towers will evaporate your 100 strong skelly horde in the blink of an eye. Some enemies have resistances that you will have to build around. Your elite might pulverize bosses in 4 seconds, but are overwhelmed when creeps out-spawns you... and so on. All builds can sweep the base game (about 10 hours for first run), but NG+ requires a bit more discrimination - leaving room for experimentation and replayability. You'll only have to think hard about builds when it comes to NG+4 and above.
