Everything from the jump has the sign of extreme quality to it; The ui is slick, the graphics and soundtrack are gorgeous, and the controls are very smooth and work flawlessly despite my unreasonable demand to play using 3 separate controllers simultaneously: I'll switch on the fly between keyboard, gamepad and arcade stick depending on my mood and it works just fine, which is quite rare to see and i really wish other games would let us do. No doubt you're aware of the complaints regarding difficulty and enemy balance. Going through the middle of the game, i can't say there've been many situations where i feel like the game has led me to a "cheap" death; almost every time i died, the feedback on what i've done and what should've been done differently was clear, and as a general rule i was able to get past every room i've been to so far in a reasonable amount of time. The exception to this would be enemy gauntlet rooms, as i find they often create situations where one enemy of a group of enemies will use a move that controls the ground space while another enemy uses a move at the same time that makes it so you can't jump, completely walling you off unless you have space to run away, and some of these gauntlet rooms are really small. This game feels comparatively more linear than HK; because of that plus most rooms seemingly being combat focused with relatively less varied traversal/item collecting/puzzle rooms, the joy of exploring the map is a bit dampened, and you often don't get to be fully refreshed from the feeling of mental exhaustion gained from learning the previous combat room before you find yourself in another cycle of tricky combat, however in those rooms the feeling of mastery is there to be found in spades. In short, this game doesn't pull any punches, but it does punch far above its weight class in terms of charm and quality that it oozes at every moment, which makes the overall experience very positive and enjoyable when played in short bursts.
