Story

Gameplay

Gestaltung

What I liked:

• Fast skillful combat
• Upgrade/Perk System
• Level and enemy design

What I didn’t like:

• Virtual sections
• Story and pacing
• Some parkour and boss sections

My Score:

Quick Summary

More in depth:

• The STORY is half told while you are traversing which never breaks the flow of the game; it seems like here the developers know what kind of player will be playing the game, but it’s impossible to pay attention as you’re playing the game, so I don’t know what the game was about. Then there are these inside the MATRIX SECTIONS SPRINKLED THAT BRING THE GAME TO A CRAWL AS YOU SLOWLY WALK without any dashing with exposition dump and teach new abilities sometimes. These sections are the weakest part as it hurts the pacing and could at least let me use my parkour. The platforming is braindead and has weird collect orbs to progress, it’s like this section was made by a separate studio and just randomly put in this game. It’s about 1-2 hours of the whole game so 25% of the game is boring, easy and pointless.
• The COMBAT HERE IS THE TRUE GEM as it feels like you have a lot of ways to kill the enemy in some sections in any order you want with whatever ability and perks you have. The perks are really nice here as you have limited area to fit these tetris pieces in that have meaningful impact on how you want to focus your playstyle, more dash and defense heavy, upgrade your skills to reach farther, recharge or use multiple times per charge. I did rarely use the skills though, as it never felt necessary, but maybe that’s my playstyle to just use the sword. The enemy total variety is low when compared to some others, but the attacks and placement in every single encounter felt unique and with the parkour thrown into said encounters never felt dull or repetitive, even when dying 30 times at most in some areas. This is also what I wanted the combat for Cyberpunk 2077 to feel like.
• INSTANT RESTARTS SHOULD BE TURNED ON, having a button decided to instantly start over before anything bad happens saves a lot of time but can sometimes be cheesed to prevent deaths. Without this, the game would be more annoying for sure.
• The WORLD IS NICE to look at and even with a lot of parkour thrown in, it for the most part feels like an actual place instead of clearly marked follow the path stuff. You know in games where the look of the world can be brought down by gamifying the elements to help you traverse the world, here it doesn’t feel like that. The music thrown in is really fun to get into the flow while you traverse both combat and platforming arenas with a grapple hook because every game needs one if it wants to be fast and fluid. YOU CAN UNLOCK COOL NEW SWORD SKINS BY EXPLORING, EVEN THOUGH THE GAME IS LINEAR. There are other audio logs and items that flesh out the story and world, but they weren’t really worth it for me.
• There are 3 BOSSES, the first 2 are good with the better one being the laser tower grapple parkour spiral of death and wasn’t as hard as some people make it out to be, but it is a huge spike in challenge as you are not prepared for it at all, but you get a lot of checkpoints. The other one is a duel with a robot lady that you have to time your parries and do it all in one life, so the challenge was there, but it didn’t feel like a sword fight like Sekiro or Jedi Knight and was weaker for it. The final boss felt like a standard generic boss as you wait for the weirdly slow dr octopus swings, and do a little parkour, but it didn’t feel like what I expect from a boss fight. The true final boss is the parkour in the virtual matrix afterwards.
• THE FINAL LEVEL IS THE BIGGEST SPIKE IN CHALLENGE and it shows how bad the parkour really is or me. I don’t know how sometimes I wall run flawlessly and then other 10 times I fall to my death because of something I can’t figure out. It feels like wind is pushing me back and down. I would have loved to see one huge arena or stages of arenas to push the limit of the player in the other more interesting aspect of the game, partly because I suck more than most at platforming. This game pushed my limit and patience at times. It also did end so quick, right as the flow gets good I just wanted more

My Personal Curator List

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