Recent reviews by Distort

GOTY contender for sure, struggling through and getting good was very rewarding.

I'll preface this review with a common sentiment; I've been excited for this game to release, and have been following along for over a year. While the information prior to this Early Access release was sparse, I was still excited to play based purely on the visuals alone.

With that being said, this game is hard to recommend in it's current state. I have a fairly middle of the road setup, a 2070 Super, Ryzen 5 3600, and 16GB of RAM. There are many instances where, even after tweaking the graphics to be more modest and not going with the game's recommended defaults, I still experience significant stuttering and frame loss. This is most noticeable when zoning in to the "hub" city at the start of each run. Additionally, when you start a boss encounter, a cutscene plays - immediately following that cutscene, you regain character movement. The issue with this is you will experience a large performance drop coming out of the cutscene, and by that point, the boss has already dashed towards you and is now juggling you like a toy.

I would also like to touch on the difficulty - this game is difficult, but not nearly as brutal as people are making it out to be. I have no prior experience with any Soulsborne games similar to this but was still able to gain my footing after a death or two into my first run. I recognize that I am still not good at the game, which leads to my first feature request - A training mode. How is someone supposed to improve in this game and learn core game mechanics like parrying, which I completely ignored because I cannot understand the timing, when the enemies spawn in packs of 4+, all deal 20+ damage to you (with base health being 75), and attack you all at the same time? I would love to be able to learn the timing of parrying in a training area in the main hub with just 1 mob. This would at least give players like me who want to get better at this challenging game a chance to improve. Many reviews harp on this game and its difficulty, purely because there is no teaching or learning. You are expected from minute one to know how to play this game and are punished for not having prior experience. After 3 hours of playtime, I've had 1 successful parry, but have learned that spamming dash is a very effective crutch.

This leads to my second request - Medigem Conversion should be available from the very beginning. The single thing I knew going into this game was that as soon as I got a Golden currency, I needed to spend it on this skill in order to have any hope of having runs last longer than a few minutes. Something as important as health regen should not be locked behind a wall that is so easily missable if you don't know what to do with the currency, or the importance of this single skill versus the other options like upgrading the vendors.

In the time I've spent playing this game, I was not able to extract once or defeat a single boss (I attempted the 2* Wolf boss 3 times and was stomped for all of them). I know it sounds like a skill issue, and it is, but I began to hate dying for one very interesting reason - Not losing my gear, which does suck, but the actual length of time between dying and zoning back in to the world, and then zoning back in to the dungeon. I was timing this at about 2 minutes each time I died. Every single time you die, you have to watch all of your gear, one by one, lose a tick of durability. You're not able to skip this either, which adds frustration to the already salty situation of you dying. When you finally finish watching all of the gear and mods you worked hard for break, you get tossed back in to the main hub city, are able to buy worse versions of all the good items you just lost, and then go back in to the dungeon and get killed due to your lack of gear. It's a very odd cycle of dying because you're bad, buying bad gear because you can't just zone back in with just a sword and no gun, as you'd be at too large of a disadvantage, and then dying again because you have even worse gear than last time.

Finally, I do believe the kbm controls need some work. I don't own a controller, and against my better judgement, I still decided to give the game a try after reading multiple reviews saying how important it was. These people aren't joking, it seems this game was developed entirely with controller as the only input method in mind, and kbm was very hastily added prior to the Early Access launch. It can't shake the feeling that this is just a console game, with this PC version being a very strange rip/port. There are so many very basic settings missing such as graphics settings (screen shake, chromatic abrasion, bloom), no way to limit FPS cap, the ability to rebind keys (I would like to open the inventory/map with Tab instead of M, for example) that it will leave you wondering how this was even pushed through and deemed acceptable to charge $30 for.

Currently, I would not pay more than $15 for this game; But what do they care, they've already got my $30. I'll follow the progress of this game from the sidelines, and reluctantly try to improve in my free time as I do find the gameplay loop to be fun, but I don't have much faith in its long term success given the current state of this release. It may be best to wait a year or two, pick it up on sale, and hope see how the development of this game has progressed.

brain go brrr