Recent reviews by Azure

They tacked on a season pass. What more needs to be said?

It was a long road for the Arrowhead team and Helldivers 2, but ever since their big weapon balance pass, among other updates that worked towards trying to make a variety of equipment viable in higher difficulties, this has become a really rock solid, fun experience to have with friends and randoms. I hope they maintain this momentum.

You know what, I rarely ever go back to change a review, so consider this a positive in the game's favor. I can't think of another game in a while that's made me go through the 5 stages of grief multiple times every time I opened it. When you first pick this up, you're going to feel like a fish out of water. Even the lowly bandits make you feel like a pleb. You'll die, repeatedly, to stupid mistakes. Sometimes to bullshtick, but a lot of it just your own mistakes. And you know, I couldn't accept that for a long time. I thought the AI was just cheap, scummy, cheating bassardos (at higher difficulties), and I struggled for a long, long time before, suddenly everything just... clicked.

Now, most of what I'm about to say mainly applies to the hard difficulties (so Hard, Hell, YABAI, and European YABAI). You see, there's a trick to this game. You'll want to play aggressive, and think pulling flashy moves like using your charge attack to give your dodge more momentum to get behind an enemy, turn around, and slice them up the bum... and you know, that may work in some cases. But the real deal... the real way you become a samurai master is learning the art... of holding up + dodge to bait a horizontal slash, ducking (down + dodge) as they attack, and, with pretty insane timing required sometimes, doing an upper slash.

Bam. You now have the single best tool for combating most hard enemies. There's exceptions of course, but the majority of my kills are done with this method now. Making enemies kill each other on accident is the 2nd best method. Don't bother learning to block. Don't bother with countering. Hell, you don't even need to attack first most of the time. Learn to dodge. It'll be the most important tool in your defensive arsenal. Do that, and you can dance amongst your enemies and laugh as they kill one another for you.

All that said... I maintain that two levels within the game, Nighttime 1, and Sunset 1 (maybe Sunset 2 as well) are stupidly hard for the wrong reasons. Nighttime 1 sports 28 enemies, enemies that come at you in waves on both sides of you, and the level is getting darker and darker with each kill, and almost every one of them requires you to play like you're fighting an experienced veteran or even a master. Sunset 1 has around 22 enemies. Now, is it impossible to beat these? No, but it SUCKS being unable to progress because you make 1 teeny mistake near the end and it just kills the pacing of the game.

Keeping all that in mind, if manage to stick with it, I think it'll be one of the more rewarding experiences you'll have with a game.
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Original, Butthurt Review:

So First Cut: Samurai Duel has a lot of beauty, atmosphere, and charm... no doubt about it, and the fighting mechanics seem fairly easy to grasp albeit hard to master. It has a few modes (Duel, Survival, Ring Out, Last Man Standing) and a campaign to boot. I've gotten about 16 hours of playtime at this point and have beaten the campaign on Tough difficulty (which is 1 step above what the game considers "Normal" difficulty) and got as far as Act 6 (out of 8 total) Mission 1 on "Hard" difficulty (which is 1 step above "Tough"). I had my share of fun, but also a share of many immense frustrations... frustrations that ultimately push me to not recommend this.

Maybe it reads like I'm being unfair and am just mad that a videogame is kicking my ass, but I feel what the game has to offer is being held back by some questionable level design choices and cracked out AI at higher difficulties. Like, the very 2nd act of the game is composed of 1 mission in which you're expected to kill 26 opponents in one go. 26 people on what is basically the 5th mission of the campaign after facing maybe less than 10 enemies at most on the previous 4 missions. Now, this number was nerfed a little for "Normal" difficulty, but it remains the same (and includes even more) on the higher difficulties. In a game where one hit kills you, the number of opponents you have to kill to progress becomes a really big point of contention for the game's pacing and potentially demoralizing when you end up stuck because you're not a super reaction god and can't kill more than 10 people in a row, or god forbid you get to the last enemy and you misread one attack and have to start all over. Another mission later in the campaign is just as bad with around 22 enemies (on Hard difficulty). I just feel First Cut plays at its best when its enemy counts are kept at a reasonable level. Like, the final boss of the entire campaign is far easier than either of those two levels.

Now... In regards to the enemy AI itself. Obviously there's only so much you can do with fighting mechanics as deceptively simple as First Cut's, but a majority of the time, when you're fighting a "hard" AI opponent, you're basically just either exploiting them brazingly reading your inputs to try to bait out an attack to capitalize on with the unexpectedly long range of your charged horizontal slash (seriously you can juggle your left and right movement buttons and the opponent will follow you exactly), or you dodge, parry, and avoid their attacks long enough until the game seems to finally decide you've earned a hit on them. That isn't to say there aren't some strategies that can give you an edge on some of them, but a majority of the time you'll feel like you're at the mercy of RNGesus that an attack will get through.

So all in all, if you enjoy stupidly hard games that are hard for the sake of being hard, or perhaps if you just avoid playing the campaign on any difficulty higher than "Normal", maybe First Cut will be right up your alley. Otherwise, I'd wait and see how the game's development progresses.

Just look up videos regarding Ready or Not's multitude of AI issues with the context that they had a sizeable group of supporters they stopped pushing updates to for nearly a year... supporters that could've tested their game before they decided to slap "1.0" on it and had the gall to consider it ready.

The game works better as another "terrorist hunt" shooter than the "spiritual successor to swat 4" everyone hoped this would be. An apparent lack of care for quality assurance for even the most basic things like subtitles should tell you all you need to know.

Maybe they'll fix it, maybe they won't, but you should save your money for now.

Damn good potential here. Right now, it's a fun sandbox to satiate your need to stab, slice, and bludgeon poor npcs to death. Looking forward to the future of this game.

Almost a month after its initial release, there are still issues plaguing this game. Constant connectivity issues coupled with mission desyncs have made this game difficult to enjoy.

All I want to do is play parallel quests with my friend, but it's nearly impossible because, most of the time, enemy fighters end up freezing in place unable to be damaged (this seems indicative of a desync). If we're lucky, it'll resync itself and we can continue playing; however, the game often just can't seem to come back after a single desync.

As an added bonus... the developers didn't think to let you bring up the PAUSE menu in a multiplayer game, so your only options are to either wait for the timer to run out (which some quests have a time limit up to 15 minutes) or you ALT + F4 your game.

Even so, if you don't plan on playing this game's multiplayer, are a fan of DBZ, and enjoy creating your own characters, then you may still find enjoyment in this game; however, I cannot recommend this game in its current state.

Wait for these issues to be fixed, or spend your money elsewhere.

Update:
Still problems with desync even after all this time.