I want to love this game for its great rogue-like design but I've lost patience with its combat system.
Please, fix the blocking so that my weapon points to my cursor.

Yeah, I really want to say all of the positive things I like about this game, but it's just not fully polished in it's current state so I'll just list the things I've noticed that hopefully will be updated in someway in the future. I still play this game though, so don't take it as hate on the game.

First of all, the attack directions are confusing at times, mostly because you'll go for a swing and think it'll hit, but sometimes your character will completely miss what should've been a hit even if you saw your weapon make contact with an enemy. Blocking is unpredictable where I swear you'll do everything the game wants you to do, only to have things slowly fall apart sometimes because blocking doesn't work all of the time because of the physics of weapons being a bit inconsistent at times and the fact that blocking without a shield can be based on luck. Hell, even with a shield I've seen enemy's weapons straight up clip right through your block and still hit you.

There is a way to block more consistently I found out, but you have to go for the block and move your weapon's defensive block towards where the strike is coming from, and still sometimes that doesn't work depending on the physics. If attack directions of both you and the enemies were more polished, I wouldn't complain. But pair the issues with blocking and attacking together and it's an issue that should get patched some day. It gets more annoying when you get a bad character like a politician, where you pretty much are given little to no health to start off with and can die from a few swings.

Look, I get the point, it's supposed to be brutal and unforgiving. However, I've played games that do this but have a better consistency in how the combat works, like Dark Souls, Sekiro, or again, Mount and Blade.

Literally if either the defense mechanics or attacking mechanics worked more consistently and didn't have some of the bugs I've seen at times, this game would be 10/10. However, it's more like between 7/10 to 8/10 in my book.

I've found that in order to win, you have to dodge and weave using the same meta attack moves to get around the enemy while blocking any attacks that you can possibly block. No one that I've seen play this game has been able to win that many matches without receiving some amount of damage, and here's another point I have to get across.

Not to mention it'd also be cool if the enemies had stamina drainage, because as far as I've seen, they might as well have the stamina of a cheetah with how unbreakable their fighting is. Meanwhile you can't do too many swings if you have too much gear on, then you notice the enemy you're fighting has heavier if not equal gear to you and can just not suffer the negative stamina effects for wearing it makes no sense.

Literally all of my gripes so far with this game can be easily fixed with more updates, because you know how much interesting this game would be if the enemy had limited stamina like the player does? That'd actually improve the fighting a bit and would make it more logical because no one can have infinite stamina especially when you have multiple pieces of armor on and are wielding something at the same time.

Ok, after finishing my long rant on what I truly think of this game, I want to make one thing clear with the developer Jordy. I like your game and appreciate what it presents itself as very much, however I've played many games that are similar to yours that just have much more satisfying combat that is more polished. I hope you can update the game to make the combat more satisfying like the games I've mentioned because then I'd play your game more often honestly because it's addicting.

Just to be frank, I can play games like mount and blade on the hardest difficulty with iron man and be happy if I die in that game, as it was most likely my fault, however this game can sometimes get you killed by game mechanics not working when they should. When it does work, it's fun as hell, just I really do think there needs to be more polish and, I know it's early access so that's why I made this review.

I understand you may view me as just being "mad" at not being able to "get good" or whatever most people would say now a days, as dictated by one of your death screens that literally says, "time to write a bad review". However, I'm literally not mad at all, I'm just speaking my mind.

Other than that, I'll still play your game, but I hope you can flesh out the combat a bit more because I can see a good game waiting to sprout.

Like I said, I've had good times with your game in the little amount of time I've played it. I've had gladiators do pretty good, so it's not a skill issue honestly, I'm just doing this review to give you my opinion on things really. If these issues get fixed someday, I'd be pleased.

Awful controls, wrong buttons are shown in the turorial and I wasn't able to complete even the first task, as I had the choice between Key?, Key? and Key? - with a gamepad.