Recent reviews by Deadmeat

Artistically rad, mechanically stale.

Maybe the game picks up in the later levels but the first couple levels far the game has just been parking all my units in front of the enemy spawn and just letting them shred. Upgrading the bases feels pretty tedious and unit upgrades are just stat adjustments.

Sucks to thumbs down a new IP tbh

Neat game, but feels off for me.

The reach of melee weapons feels way too shallow, to the point where I feel like I need to be clipping into the enemy to hit them. This is a major pet peeve of mine in first person melee combat games.

Stamina regen feels painfully slow in combat even with light equipment. Just feels like certain weapons use way too much stamina or the base stamina pool is too small. Combined with the fact that you lose stamina when you take damage and it feels I'm spending too much time just strafing around waiting for my stamina to regen while enemies can just do what ever they want.

A pretty good "souls clone"

Though it plays more like sekiro and bloodborne than the actual souls games. The weapon crafting system is neat. Combat feels pretty fast with a decent balance of proactive and reactive play.

Only gripe is that the enemy variety is somewhat lacking and the level design is pretty linear and basic in comparison to fromsoft games. The dialogue is also kinda lol. I guess the dialogue choices and a quest options are pretty meh too because there is basically an objectively correct way to do every quest, either you pick the right option and get a reward or you dont.

(Oh yeah, all the hotel record songs are great too.)

I didnt get too far but the game just didnt feel uhhh, clever enough? I think the best way to describe it is like an off brand suda 51 game, but kinda lacking in personality. I cant really put my finger on what the issue specifically is, but it somehow comes off as kinda bland.

Pretty good but stop reading the reviews cause you're gonna get spoiled.

Ok so wingrave (the big knight dude) has this ability called righteous strike that is a big damage cleave that also heals him

It resets on combo enders

He also has a passive that lets him heal whenever he preforms a combo ender

With the Sword and Shield you can do one light attack and then hold down heavy attack to get an immediate combo finisher shield slam, which also charges your weapon skill.

So all you have to do is Light, Heavy, Righteous Strike, (Left Click > Hold E > 1)

You can now face tank on the hardest difficulty even when under geared and under leveled

This has been in the game since launch....

The game is neat, it has a cool art style and the dungeons are pretty fun and I like the progression of the game. But when I found out about this instant win combo, it legit killed any enjoyment or goodwill. I can just press the same 3 buttons over and over again and just win.

Theres also a plethora of other like QoL and UX issues. Stuff like some menus being designed for controller and some for M+KB. Or the fact that the game looks / wants to be controller friendly but its feels like its designed for M+KB more than anything, like sometimes my character attacked in the direction of the camera and not the joystick. No gear compare. ect.

Idk they still have a long way to go before this game truly gets its act together if Im being brutally honest.

This is the first gacha game Ive ever played for more than 2-3 days.

The combat is solid, alot of RPG's are just about the damage you deal and the damage you take. In SoC there's multiple factors that make that make theory crafting team comps interesting because of utility and crowd control skills having an actual impact and not being just waste of the turn economy. Theres also Environmental hazards and other aspects of the battle map that make decision making interesting.

If you dont want to engage with gacha stuff then you can just do the roguelite "spirals of destiny" mode. Its alright, I guess. As for the gacha fairness and QoL, I cant really speak on it because I dont play these types of games but I've yet to spend a penny on anything and I havent really felt the need to. There does seem to be some p2w items in one of the season passes so heads up with that though.

AI artwork

This dude really wanted to voice his own game, huh? lmao

Honestly, the world map is pretty ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ empty compared to base game, huge stretches of open land with nothing really notable there, think consecrated snowfield. Exploration rewards are at its worst, legacy dungeons are really short and kind of boring and alot of zones are about finding the one specific cave on the map to access them compared to base game where almost every zone had multiple points of entry

Final boss ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sucks too, honestly the combat design of the game has a devolved into being pretty unfun. Rule of cool is out the window because FS games gotta be "challenging" so alot enemies and fights just have crazy amounts of poise or can animation cancel their own hitstun into backdashes and stuff and alot of moves just have crazy forward momentum and like 720 degree tracking. Idk if they're making the game like this to make it challenging for spirit ash users, spirit ashes can ♥♥♥♥ right off if that's case, or whatever. All I can say as a dude that plays these games solo, ♥♥♥♥♥ starting to feel more and more miserable. Like whats the point of all these weapon skills and spells if the enemies and bosses are just gonna be max poise and doing 12 hit strings with like very little openings lol