Recent reviews by Jumps

It's peak, I'm afraid.

I'M DOING MY PART

I usually don't bother with reviews, especially if I agree with the general consensus. But I feel I should warn potential buyers here. This is an uninspired mess of a game, despite its short length. It is entirely derivative in story, enemies and game mechanics. Dungeon layouts are linear with the odd alternate fork path. Bosses are unimaginative in both their design and their attacks, and will without fail spawn adds to artificially ramp up difficulty. Even the final boss has to summon some buddies so you can refill your ammo. Overworld exploration is seldom rewarding. Sometimes your curiosity will be rewarded with a chest that contains scrap (money) and maybe some iron (think like titanite, used to upgrade gear), but the world is littered with both resources to the point where you get annoyed at "basic melee enemy #5" when they interrupt your spree of breaking crates and urns to get the scrap and iron hidden within.

Story. Okay. The game promises a lot up front. An epic quest to save the world from extraplanar invaders with a "we bring peace by killing everyone :)" philosophy? Sure. Sounds good. But almost immediately, the game seems to distract itself in a quest to find a man with possible answers. The game has you travel to various other planes, which occurs without much fanfare. But before you get too settled, you're off to the next realm, making any debuff or elemental protection items specific to that realm (e.g., heavy water elixirs for radioactive damage in the desert realm) practically worthless going forward, as elemental types are seldom reused. This is curious, as the game reuses assets and mechanics whenever it can. I was actually surprised when a "late-game" enemy actually brought back fire damage. But that was for a single enemy type.

NPCs, the ones you don't immediately shoot on sight upon teleporting to their home without first discerning their motives, are often only there to offer vague context about what's going on as you search for "The Founder" of your dumpster of a hub town and its five residents with more than one line of dialogue. Eventually you find the object of your quest sitting in a jail cell, somehow still with his key to access the final boss, and then you just leave him where you found him. I guess taking him back to his granddaughter was too much.

Perhaps the worst offense for someone who likes story-driven games is the cop-out of having the "lore" imparted onto old computer logs. There are various terminals near the end of the game, each one with a dump of drivel writing that provides some context for the area you're about to enter for the final boss. The game does such a bad job with making you care about the world and, sadly, this was their desperate final attempt at making the player feel invested in the story... five minutes before the sudden end.


For a game that so obviously wanted to be compared to dark souls, they didn't seem to get what made dark souls so memorable and entertaining. Everything falls flat in this husk of a game, one that is over before you even have time to ask yourself "Wait, that's it?"