Recent reviews by null

Unpolished gem.

It looks weird, controls feel rough/clunky, it has some of the worst feeling movement, it mixes complex counter-oriented combat (cool, but lacking play-testing) with resource management (not a fan of this). The combat is nice, and I can see this being good, but it's not there now - at least not for most people.


TDLR: Darkest dungeon with counterattack-focused action combat.

You're a necromancer. You build your characters, and control them to fight your battles (action combat). If they survive, you can use them in next runs.
In combat you attack to break opponents stance and then 1 hit damages their health (rinse and repeat).
You can parry (or perfect parry), evade hits or roll around opponent which the game sets up as an opportunity to backstab, but I didn't pull it off.


Let's start with clunky controls. Movement is slow and even if it's not a big part of combat it makes it feel sluggish. Some combat options don't feel right. Like rolling around opponent can only be initiated when you're very close and there's no indicator to where "close" is. Dagger can just fail to reach an enemy because it moved away a bit and you have to stop attacking to move forward. More importantly dagger bounces off. Realistic, but feel awful.

Learning curve/animations. In the intro you're given a look into what to expect from the game. In the very first dungeon you meet enemies that have INSTANT animations: 1 moment you have them stunlocked and the next moment you've taken damage. The first enemy I encountered was a polearm dude who mixed diffeferent types of attacks (have different counters) in quick succession. I've also seen attacks (magic) that none of the tools I've seen can counter. Maybe preemtive positioning could help. Idk, it just doesn't feel fair given you have limited retries.

That leads me to the next point. Your corpses don't fully recover after a failed run and even-though I completed my first run, I had 3 corpses and half health and only had enough materials to make 1 more. I'm sure it can be countered later, but I lost my motivation to play when I realized my next run is crippled.


I got it in a bundle, and it's absolutely a game I would recommend to pick up in a bundle or on a discount, just because it's so unique. I don't think it's something I'd be happy with for 20$.

Don't call it a "Soundtrack" if you're delivering an application.

I can only recommend this to people who love the pitch AND are experienced with FromSoft games.

If you play solo, it's a soulslike where runback to boss takes 40min.
If you play multiplayer, you can be revived, but the entire team has to be good to win.

Classes are fun. I've tried most of them, and enjoyed most of them.

• Balanced around rushing between points of interests. This means you can't explore the map and hope to win (unless you're REALLY good). You are guaranateed to waste a bunch of runs until you figure that out and until you figure out routes to take.
  
• No way to communicate. You can heal, create openings on bosses, tank and more. All of that is wasted if your team doesn't know it.
  
• Inherited bloat that wasn't adapted to the roguelike (quick paced) genre. Which classes/weapons/skills does this apply to: "Mind", "Faith", "Intelligence", "Incantations", "God-slaying incantations", "Arcane damage"? WTF is "Affinity"? Scaling isn't even visible by default. You're on timer and the game doesn't have a single tool-tip explaining what any of these mean, what they boost, and how those things differ from similar sounding things. Consumable are impossible to quickly look through (you get clunky Elder Scrolls pointing to see icon description) and then consumable/weapon effects are spelled in plain white text that is difficult to gauge at a glance.
  
  • You see: "Throw at enemies to inflict magic damage" and "Throw at enemies to inflict damage and build up onset of blood loss" (there are more variants)
    
  • This should have been "Throw to inflict <magic icon>" and "Throw to inflict <sword/physical damage icon> and
    <bleed icon>" to make it easier to read at a glance.
    
• Attack-Revive mechanic is very cool in concept, it corpses need a far bigger hitbox. Most weapons aren't designed to be hitting stuff crawling on the ground. It's possible with lock-on, but then camera pans down and it's difficult to see threats.
  
• Awful matchmaking. There are 8 bosses, 4 world events and 8 character-specific quests, and there's a separate matchmaking branch for each combination. The players can be split into 256 branches.
  
• Crashes happen every hour or 2. You can reconnect into session, but it counts as a death and you cannot recover anything. If you're solo, the run is lost.
  
• You are punished for others leaving. Enemies don't scale down and you can't leave without also getting penalized. To leave without penalty you have to wait for boss and then die. You're not really rewarded for that time.
  
• Battle Royale shrinking area, with map design that can leave you cornered.
  
• Climbing is is clunky. You can wall-jump and grab ledges. Ledge-grabs don't always work where they should and wall jumps work where they shouldn't. You can wall-jump infinitely as long as the wall is not completely horizontal (75-70° seems enough). By the way if not for infinite wall jump there are FAR more dead-ends that can have you killed by shrinking play-area.
  
• Death is no the end, but it snowballs failure because you lose 1 level and all currency when you die. You can only recover currency. This doesn't fit 40 minute sessions.
  
• Barely any variety across different runs. Map doesn't change. Most weapon types don't work on any particular class (and ones that do feel the same). Skills very rarely matter. Passives are mostly tiny buffs that you would only notice on a spreadsheet. 6% attack boost one of the better ones. Why is this a rogue-like/permadeath game?

I'm sure I missed some, but the list is already longer than anyone will bother reading.

It's not a massive deal, but I feel like it's worth pointing out.

This "Season pass" only gives a tiny fraction of all DLCs and I think both the name "Season pass" and pricing are terrible.
It offers very little for a fairly high price (even 15$ at 50% discount) and a full set of DLCs costs the same (or more) as base game).

• Sacred Treasures are basically taking mechanics from other character's Sacred Treasures, which you'll be able to use in Act 3.. You'll MAYBE use 2 beyond just trying them.
  
• In most cases Sacred treasures have better mobility than fastest mounts. For all the other places an in-game mount has a similar speed. Also most of these mounts are slow so they only have cosmetic value.
  
• 10 Outfits are a drop in a bucket.
  
• BGM ancient (we're talking PS2 days) and is not complete...

If you're looking for a full set of DLC it will more than double the price of base game.

This game hasn't fundamentally changed since OW2 on PS2. It was great then.
OW3 added a few minor improvements which felt worth the price.
OW4 added LOTS of speedbumps, no QoL improvements, and costs 70$ (not even final price).

The only substantial addition to the game is "magic" system, many of which are effectively slightly weaker, but spammable combo finishers of various characters. It's an interesting idea, but for the most part it feels like it was slapped on top, without considering that it devalues actual combos. Of course the game has a new "enemy" (in quotations, because it's more of a totem) that cannot be defeated without using this new "magic", and there's also an unavoidable enemy attack that can only be cancelled by magic...

Drawn out AND has lots of speed-bumps/nerfs

• XP feels slower, while max level is effectively 990
  
• Weapon fusion(crafting) has been reworked. Biggest changes: more work to max out 1 element, can't fuse lower weapons into higher ones to transfer elements without wasting. i.e. ALL of the best elements are completely wasted on low level weapons, which means you're stuck with crappy ones at low levels when you COULD be boosting all the secondary characters(you'll need em).
  
• Multiple cool characters from previous games got nerfed hard. They are still playable, but a slog.
  
• Several elements got removed(e.g. Typhoon) or reworked(e.g. Multi), so low rangecharacters are unable to catch up to "strong" ones and require an even slower playstyle on higher difficulties. For context: basic enemies will destroy you by chipping away with run-attacks (from off-screen) if you don't have enough range to stun them.
  
• A lot more grind to "finish" the game (achievements).

• 80$ "Ultimate Deluxe" doesn't include all content
  
• Adding a 30$ "Season pass" to that ALSO doesn't include all content because there is AT LEAST
  
• Adding a 30$ "Legendary Costume pack" doesn't make it a complete set either.

That's OVER 140$ for a game that is over a decade old with DLCs that are just as old.

It's the 2nd KOEI game I touch that seems to have all the design sensibilities of 2-man indie studios of 2000s.

• Stuck to specific resolutions (no ultrawide).
  
• Framerates are fixed to 30 or 60.
  
• Mouse controlled Camera is REALLY slow and there are no sensitivity settings
  
• Keyboard controls are weird and half of them are not rebindable. Like Esc key is Musou attack and not menu. F1 is menu. I'd love to see how they justify actual menu controls.
  
• Graphics menus have highest setting on the left (opposite of industry standard).
  
• Checkpoints in some places are just before a long cutscene so if you're playing Pandemonium to get some early weapons/elements, you might be waiting up to a minute to retry after getting 1 hit killed.
  
• There's STILL no option to zoom out to see what's above or behind you. Half of finishers launch enemies over your camera and sometimes they just fly forward while other times they jump behind you. You can't see those, nor basic foot solder attacks coming. Foot solders aren't a big threat, but they tend to surround and interrupt with dash attacks A LOT.

I know these might sounds insignificant, but there's so many of these things it feels that entire game feels very cheap and I can't emphacize this enough: THIS IS A 70$ GAME WITH LIKE 100$ WORHT OF DLCS. FIX YOUR ♥♥♥♥!

The only big negative so far is bad readability for parries.
The timings are different across various enemy attacks.

• The hit frame doesn't always line up with parry window.
  
• There's a sound cue (might need to turn down the music to hear it) to help with parries and actual parry window comes after different delays after the sound cue for different enemy attacks. For ranged attacks it can be a whole second later than fastest melee attacks.
  
• Virtually all enemies do delayed attacks
  
• Enemy combos have different timings between attacks, and even different timings between sound cue and parry window.

It matters because bosses (all optional and only late story bosses) kill you very fast if you fail. Early optional bosses 1-2 hit kill. End game bosses 1 hit kill. For few exceptions you can tank a few hits, but you have to stretch those few hits over a long battle. i.e. Your strategy/build means nothing until you memorize the timings to defend yourself.

I got myself a mod that adds +0.05s this is to parry window and it seems to have accounted for most common melee parry timing desyncs. Ranged enemies are still all over the place.

Fun fact: This game has 27k reviews (~25k positive) and that mod has 33k+ unique downloads.

As far as the rest of the game goes

Platforming could be a bit smoother, but it's not a super big part of the game.
Upscaling/Anti-aliasing is forced on and it creates ghosting. It's especially bad on hair in some cutscenes.

Everything else so far has been great.

Save the money. There are too many characters.
You will probably not play most of them, nor care enough to equip each one with an outfit.

It features a few nice outfits, but 33$ is way too much money for some re-used skins in a top-down game.

Save the money. There are too many characters.
You will probably not play most of them, nor care enough to equip each one with an outfit.

It features a few nice outfits, but 33$ is way too much money for some re-used skins in a top-down game.

Save the money. There are too many characters.
You will probably not play most of them, nor care enough to equip each one with an outfit.

I would argue many outfits in this set look worse than default ones, but this is a matter of taste.

Warriors gameplay fits great into top-down gameplay, but I'm not sure it fits roguelike genre.
The game feels like a retooled 2010 game, with the formula dumbed down so much that pretty much nothing but core combat loop remains.

Unless you're specifically after rogue-like mode, I'd recommend getting Warriors Orochi 3 or for on sale (28$ and 35$ respectively).

• Same music as in other games.
  
• Same combat, except all battles are just "kill 30-500 enemies" in an arena that feels like an empty box.
  Part of the appeal of other games in the series are the in-battle objectives that gave you reason to go places.
  
• In terms of character progression only character levels stayed. Everything else either is gone, or rather transfered into rogue-like upgrades.
  
• UI somehow look worse. Image quality, layout, scrolling, pop ups and so many other things belong in early 2000s.

80$ (over x3 of base price) doesn't even buy you everything.