Thoughts after finishing the game - eurojank, but I like it lol

[Evangelion]

I just finished the last achievement and can say that I pretty much enjoyed the game.

(Some spoilers ahead, I'll put them under the tag so you have been warned)

The story was overall nice, the lore seems interesting and overall the settings felt original - the way magic works being the best example.

As for the characters, I found them pretty wholesome and enjoyed the conversations and quests with them except obviously the Eye, but I do hope if we get an expansion or something he gets a redemption arc, for some reason I feel like he deserves it

Combat & Enemies
Now comparing to most reviews and comments I can see, after the first hour or so of getting used to it, I really had no issues with combat - but it's pretty much a definition of *eurojank* - however this to me causes zero issues.

I only used 1h+shield at start, but to be honest with the way 2H sword works, 1h/shield are pretty useless and there's barely a reason to use them. (More about that in a bit)
Bows, while their hitreg is a bit janky (lol), were still pretty useful against bosses and getting some annoying parts off them while not having to worry about climbing.

When it comes to climbing the bosses, I used the automatic one as I found that option to work better (since you can still use E to do it manually at times). It worked alright most of the time, sometimes it got a bit weird and I got hit/caught in stupid ways even though I moved out of the way, but it wasn't that big of an issue since I never died due to it. Same goes for climbing on the walls and other environment.
Other than that, bosses were pretty interesting and satisfying to fight, especially breaking off the parts and trying to figure out how to harvest some of them.

The only boss that wasn't really all that fun was Surgeborn - now its abilities are fine and I have no issues with that, but that's the only boss where it felt like you can only fight in a single way no matter what - Maybe I did it wrong lol, but every time I fought it I just tore off its armor pieces off with flame bow due to being unable to damage them unless they're heated up and then just freeze its hand and harvest it... Comparing to the fact that you can fight any other boss in 5 different ways, it really felt kind of lame/boring

Fighting regular enemies to me was never an issue, I found out that just smashing them around with telekinesis and bashing them in with heavy 2H sword attack did the job pretty efficiently so I stuck to that most of my play. Which is also the reason why 1h sword was pretty redundant to even use.

Magic
Now as for the magic, I almost never use magic in RPG's, but here it works so well, especially the telekinesis, it's so fun to use. Throwing enemies and so many other things found around the world is extremely satisfying, especially considering you can interact with so many things.
That's not to say that other abilities are useless, they all have their uses and I used magic consistently.
Fire breath to remove ice crystals and save myself from cold and to heat up ore rocks to get better materials.
Ice Wall to build bridges to reach areas I wouldn't be able just with jump and Ensnaring blast to launch myself to all kinds of weird places
Kinetic stream to just fly around the map like MiG-25 (and reach even crazier places than with ice wall and ensnaring).
Magic really tied well with the world and the different weather conditions, probably the most enjoyable part of the game.

World & Areas
Don't have much to say here, none of the areas were boring and I had fun exploring all of them and trying to get into every secret location I could find.

Quests
Quests themselves are pretty basic, they're not bad or anything but mostly it's just "go there, get that" or "go kill specific boss again", which is fine, I had no issues with it overall.

However later into the game, you had quests consistently take you back to previous zones and areas to look for stuff that you would've found already if could've interacted with it before taking the quest - Now some of it made sense, but I felt like it happened a bit too much. It felt like the game was supposed to have another zone or two where those quests would've taken place so that it wouldn't be annoying... but instead you literally go to the same place a few times for different quests.

Achievements
They're really not all that difficult and you can get probably get almost all of them without going out of your way as long as you like exploration - the only annoying one really was freezing both arms and legs from an Ark at the same time, as it takes a lot of trial and error. Bibliophile I think I had about 95% of them discovered by the time I was done with the story, so I just had to chase maybe 10-15 of them around as they were very well hidden.

Some bad things and things to improve
I won't mention inventory as I know devs are looking into increasing that. It's still fine after getting used to and upgrading, but I'd rather have a lot more slots from the get go as it's really limiting at start.

As for the quests, I already mentioned, there's too many taking you back to the same locations just to interact with a different thing.

One big thing I have an issue with is that there's very little description and explanation on what exactly your defenses do - what exactly do armor, fire res and frost res do?
It doesn't say what % of damage it reduces, or even how exactly it works. Same attacks from frost enemies feel like they do same damage to me with 80 and 180 frost resistance. That really needs to be improved or explained better.

Also upgrading magic doesn't tell you at all what it'll improve (you can figure it out when you upgrade that it's stronger or has farther reach or something), but it'd be nice to have that.

Upgrading armor also felt like it barely has any impact, the damage reductions were barely visible and were kind of negligible.

I also hope we'll get a NG+ or something added, especially for replaying the game once the patches and/or improvements drop.

Also I do hope that we'll get an expansion or something to further explore the world/Enclave as I am really interesting in seeing how will further story go and if we'll figure out how to shut down the Veil... and hopefully for the Eye to get a redemption arc lol

[RhiaRhiRhi]

Just finished yesterday and agreed on pretty much all points. I spent the vast majority of my time using the sword+board and the bow. Having some descriptive tooltips when hovering over UI would go a long way when checking what stats and weapon/armour skills actually do.

In regards to that one dimensional feeling boss battle, it's interesting that our strategies differ slightly in that I'd throw a frost mine to freeze everything, then latch on and go to town. But I thought similarly in that this was pretty much my main option.

I also loved the idea of the yellow brick collectibles and seeing them appear in the credits at the end is super cute and inspires me to do something similar in my own stuff.

Nice stuff, YBG!