I absolutely adore Hollow Knight 1, so naturally, I dived into Silksong right on launch day and got almost exactly what I expected: Silksong is pure fan-service and Team Cherry deserves all the praise and success for their continued dedication. The game looks freaking gorgeous (like seriously!), the soundtrack is once again heart-melting and melancholic, the combat is fast, rough and fun, and the world is complex and rich with lore and secrets. There are many new and exciting gameplay and level design ideas. What more could you ask for? Well, Team Cherry seems to have forgotten that not every Hollow Knight fan has beaten the first game in the 112% category. HK1 had a lot of very hard content, but the hardest content was optional. In Silksong, however, even the mandatory content is extremely hard. Especially in the beginning of the game, when the level design is still rather linear, you face numerous road blocks which disrupt the flow of the game a bit (side-note: Apparently they nerfed the difficulty in the beginning with the first patch). Some non-optional, but ridiculously hard challenges can be made easier by meeting certain preconditions. Of course, those preconditions are secret and non-intuitive. And if you’re really unlucky, you’re stuck at a roadblock that comes with one of the few really bad corpse runs (most are ok). My recommendation: if you stop having fun and feel annoyed by some game challenge, just bite the bullet and look up a minimal spoiler guide on the web. After all, your goal should be to have fun and not meet some arbitrary “no guides” challenge. That recommendation also goes for some of the optional movement upgrades that make your life oh-so-much easier, by the way. So, bottom line, is Silksong a masterpiece like Hollow Knight was? No, but it is damn close. 9/10
I gave "Rise of the Triad (2013)" a shot because I had played the original back in the days. However, the devs clearly did not understand what makes boomer shooters so awesome. DISCLAIMER: I stopped playing this game after three hours, because I was so fed up with it, so some points of my criticism may not apply to the late game. There is almost no variation in enemy types (other than their skin). The enemies only use hitscan weapons, which eliminates projectile dodges and makes fast movement obsolete. So, the most effective way to kill an enemy is actually to just stand still and shoot a magazine worth of ammo at him, while making sure you don't have line of sight to any other enemy. This is soooo boring! There is also no weapon shuffling, you have infinite ammo and the game is freaking easy even on highest difficulty. Combine that with the most boring level design you can imagine, and there you go: Rise of the Triad (2013). In a time where we are blessed with incredibly good boomer shooters like Amid Evil or Prodeus, there is really no place for a game like this.
