I paid the 20 bucks at the gate for my entry ticket... and I deeply, deeply regret it.

I've always appreciated Let it Die as a souls-adjacent action game. The worst parts about it were always the live service design choices - needing to kill the same bosses hundreds of times for the materials needed to unlock gear, the insane gold sinking required for gear, fast travel and revives that you can barely break even on by repeatedly grinding the multiplayer TDM, until you rank up and no longer have the numbers to win TDM so you just lose even more money for trying...

Silly, naiive me heard the announcement that Let it Die was becoming a paid, offline game and thought, great! They can fix all the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ that's been plaguing it since release, remove the grind, and allow people to experience LiD as the streamlined rogue-ish soulslike it was meant to be. But it turns out, they've done none of those things! The lategame grind has been lessened for people who are longtime veterans and who were already a thousand hours deep, but, that's it. The original game has been preserved, with the following changes:

- Things that used to be premium microtransactions now cost huge chunks of ingame cash, balanced only for endgame accounts. If you didn't already have an endgame save file, you are paying $20 to experience a free to play game with free to play progression. It's even worse than that, actually, because...

- Daily login rewards have been removed. The battlepass ♥♥♥♥ is still in the game, for gold, and literally makes you buy 24h of premium service at a time for all that fomo annoyance, but login rewards have been removed and replaced with, nothing. They used to be a huge boost to help players who aren't already at endgame, and now those have been replaced with nothing, making the experience even worse.

- The primary farm source in this game is an asynchronous pvp mode called TDM, where the sthick was that players could set up teams of fighters to defend their base, and attack other players to steal their currencies, literally steal. Generally it used to be there were a lot of players that did not maintain their defensive teams, and overall being able to win consistently in TDM was doable back when I had played the online version. Now, the system is still there, but has been replaced with bots that, on the low end, seem to be way better defended than the actual players in the live game were. Meaning, you can't play for more than a few raids before you just run into a wall of bots with access to higher level gear than you and characters of a higher tier than you that will easily one-tap you, with the end result that you end up making negative money as they break your gear and pay out no reward.

Oh, and the feature where other players can steal from you? to add salt in the wound, that's still here, too. Every so often when you go to move from one floor to another you'll get a notification that a _bot_ has stolen currency from your bank. Why? The developers did not need to include this. The game has enough gold sinks as it is.

I paid money for this game, and the experience I got for that money has become worse than what it used to be as a freemium pay to win title. In the 14 hours I spent trying to salvage my account after the game's gone offline, I ended up making literally zero forward progress. Do not buy, unless you want to use a save editor to find the fun, or if you're holding out hope that modders will step up to finish the job that the developers half-assed.

Game preservation is all fine and dandy, but, I'm trying to enjoy a game, not visit a museum. There is plenty of content in this thing, that I have now paid for, which I will still never get to see, as accessing it requires treating this piece of ♥♥♥♥ like a full time job.

TL;DR I can now recommend this game with no caveats.

The recent offline version pass turns this game into the version it should have been when it launched ten years ago. The pass is more than worth it for converting everything that used to be premium into things you can obtain reasonably with in game currency.

Between this and and the PS4 version of this game I've probably played something like 600 hours of this game. To this day I have not seen a game with the same atmosphere. It's got ambient music by Akira Yamoaka and sick ass Dorohedoro art inspiration all over it. It feels like a moldy hardware store labyrinth. Somehow, it soothes the soul.

The offline version of the game fixes so many of the game's problems. So many parts of this game used to feel like a paywall because of the live-service monetisation elements. It felt like I was being held upside-down and shaken for my lunch money any time I wanted to do anything. Not to mention the needless cooldowns on so many actions, and menus that lagged horribly because the game was constantly connecting to servers. It was such an unpleasant experience that it put me off of live-service games COMPLETELY in the decade following. I felt gross whenever I caved and bought anything. I really liked this game and wanted more than anything for there to be a version of this game I could just pay for that would not ask me for money while I play it. This is now that version.

Put simply; I need the offline version of this game to do well and hopefully set a standard. I need more developers to stop throwing their games in the trash when their shareholders decide it's time to shut off the servers, which could be anywhere between 6 months to a few years depending on how they feel. I want to stop feeling like the games I get invested in will fall through my hands like sand. The maintenance of games as playable after live-service ends should be STANDARD. This is good practice and I have to commend it. Good job, you didn't throw the game and all its hard drives directly into landfill like so many others would have.

Thank you for fulfilling what should be the lowest bar of quality. I'll now give you $20.

P.S: Some people complain about how the game still connects to the servers in its current state, which I honestly agree with as being pretty silly for an "offline" version, but I can only assume this has to do with the fact that there's currently a transfer window for old save data. It has to connect to something after all I guess. Hoping this goes away, but I still think the game is more than worth it in its current state despite this.

Contrary to the game's name they didn't let it die.