izigame.me

I genuinely enjoyed it until I began noticing some "Quirks".
-> Let's start with some positives; I bought this game for a reason and I fell in love with the teaser trailer,- adding it to my Wishlist immediately. This game's music, atmosphere, and overall first impressions do it justice from a presentation perspective and can draw you in while we all cope with waiting for the Silksong release or Bloodborne on PC.
The artists and composers of this game should pat themselves on the back. I love the weapons, the enemy designs, and the environmental aesthetic of the areas I find myself in but...we need to address the elephant in the room.
-> I am so mixed on this game. I cannot recommend this game coming from a guy who loves Metroidvanias, because the fundamental design philosophy (YEAH I'M GOING THERE) is that those games ENCOURAGE exploration. If I got lost in Hollow Knight or Blasphemous, the enemies wouldn't be 3 times harder to kill for the sake of being harder. If you get lost in the last faith, you'll find yourself with enemies that deal triple damage, have triple the health, and are the same enemies you encountered in earlier areas but now significantly harder to kill.
This game's philosophy is so dependent on telling the player "This area is too strong come back later" that even if you grind for an HOUR and come back it'll still feel like you do no damage. There's no sense of growth, there's no feeling of progression at times. I had to constantly worry about potentially entering fog walls that lock me in with wave after wave of enemies that are 3x beefier than the same enemies I just fought 2 feet away. I died from curiosity in an early game area and I couldn't get my Nycrux back!
Why Punish the player for exploring IN A METROIDVANIA????
You never know which area you're supposed to be in or if you're ready for because It feels like no matter how much you grind, there's no distinction of what area is supposed to be explored yet or not. Typically, if you find the McGuffin needed to unlock a new area, it's common to think you should revisit that roadblock.
"Oh okay I found the ring that lets me move these heavy cubes! I remember seeing one outside the manor, so I should head their next!" Except no, you don't deal any damage to the enemies you encounter and they kill you easily in a couple hits.
People underestimate the purpose of the pistol in Bloodborne. The pistol was never intended to deal heavy damage, it's purpose was to parry and create opportunities to heal or close gaps for otherwise aggressive enemies. The pistol in this game is intended to shoot straight away and deal next to nothing compared to your other tools. I bring this up because It was when I had collected so many demioxide bullets that I thought to myself, "Why should I keep using my gun? It leaves me vulnerable. it doesn't parry. it deals little damage. It can't hit enemies under 2 ft. why bother?"
This is evident because I chose the MARKSMAN class in the beginning
And that's what I genuinely believe this game is telling me: "Why bother playing a particular style? Why bother exploring and being encouraged to discover secrets if you'll be punished for it? Why bother grinding for hours to fight bullet sponge enemies that aren't worth your time? Why bother playing a game that wants to be several different things and can't commit to any one of them?"

A Metroidvania with the bones of Blasphemous and the blood of...uh, Bloodborne. The Last Faith wears it's influences on it's sleeve and as such will be compared to them based on look and feel alone. But does it live up to those heights?

Honestly, I'm not really interested in questions like that. Everything is derived of something else, no one creates in a vacuum. Moreso I am interested in how much something is able to take from it's influences while providing something different or new. And even more than that, even if it's something completely derivative, is it fun? Did I like it or enjoy it? Is it a good game? The answer to that question is yes. The Last Faith is a good game. It's a fun game. It's a very enjoyable game.

Well that was an easy review.

Fine, I'll delve a bit deeper. From one look the aesthetic is executed extremely well and I can say that it's influences delivered a style and not a mirror image. While keeping a similar feeling to those worlds, Last Faith makes it's own locations, people and creatures come alive with it's own unique ideas and wonderful pixel art and animation. There is a large variety of locales with not everything having the same coloration, tone or feeling and yet it keeps the world feeling contiguous and same; i.e. not just haphazard unrelated areas thrown next to each other but mountains, swamps, cities with their own individual flavor and everything grounded in the whole overarching world. Visuals for this game are wonderful.

Gameplay is great. You have five stats to level that will govern your health and what types of weapons and damage you can use or do, and while there isn't an enormous variety there is certainly enough to make you change up your loadout when you find a new one for your build. The item variety around the damage types is generous so they expect you to regularly use the bombs and curatives they give you. Sure healing items and bullets for your gun are finite and you need to scrounge or buy them but I never found myself running out and having to grind for them like in Bloodborne. As a Metroidvania you will gradually acquire new abilities and maybe it's just my tastes but I found myself a bit overwhelmed at the choices to the extent that sometimes I'd forget I had an ability because they gave me so much to play with. Then again, people love third person character action games with weapon switching and three different modes and parries and stringing crazy stuff together so perhaps they'll adjust easier than I did. Without using a couple of them maybe I made things harder for myself but it also didn't impact my enjoyment. Combat remains fun throughout and I'd actually argue that as the game goes on the bosses become more and more enjoyable to fight. There are one or two optional ones and a couple near the end that I found really well balanced and super fun.

The music is quite good, themes humming in and out from different areas or to indicate a save room or just to have a cool accompaniment to a boss. Voice acting is similarly nice. Art and pixel work as said above is phenomenal.

My complaints are small. A couple optional fights that were re-used noticeably down to the mid fight damage switch. Bad signposting in one area of the game that made me confused where I was supposed to go. Maybe enemy health was a little too high as I always felt normal enemy fights were slightly longer than they should be? Biggest critique being that the story is not complicated or convoluted but it sure feels that way due to the way it's told. Sure sure, we're all used to the Soulslike formula of item descriptions and vague dialogue and there's something inherently charming and thrilling in figuring things out that are hinted at or laid softly at your feet. But you really need to be careful with your wording when doing things this way as there are many times in this game where an NPC or item was communicating an important story part to me and I had question marks for eyes because the way they said it was so obtuse or meandering that it completely lost me. At the end, I did understand what had transpired and the flow of events but that was in spite of the writing and not because the writing was so good at leading me. Again though, this is a small critique and the biggest one I can muster.

All in all, it's more than the sum of it's parts. It is not a reskin, it is not a copy, it is very much it's own thing and a passionate project that should be judged on it's own merits. Played over the course of a couple days because Last Faith was engaging throughout and I wanted to see where it went.

To the point
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The epitome of "we have bloodborne at home" is an annoying experience. Worth it on sale if you're curious but I wouldn't pay full price

Good Stuff
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- The pixel art is really beautiful and it is at least on par with it's main competitor Blasphemous

- The visual themes of the different sections of the game are similarly lovely to look at and the designers have done a wonderful job of making it feel like a living, breathing world.

-You certainly get a lot of bang for your buck, I couldn't stomach more then 11 hours but I'm betting it would be 15-20 for 100% I just stopped caring.

Bad Stuff
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- Ok so the biggest sin: Your character controls like complete trash. You are slow, your dodges almost seem like rolling the dice, you turn like a 16 wheeler, and none of that becomes evident until the mid game bosses where staying mobile is the best way to approach large encounters. The worst part is that you get a transformation later on that makes movement and combat more dynamic and fun but it only lasts for a few seconds in combat.

- The enemies are perhaps, the most frustrating I've encountered in a game recently. They have large health pools that just continue to grow through the game, making it so that you'll never really feel like you've made progress leveling or improving your weapon.
They will almost all have homing projectiles or ways to hit you without risking themselves or they have tracking to be able to completely 180 mid swing and the worst part? So many of them deal damage on death by exploding, lighting themselves on fire, shooting icicles etc. combat becomes: Engage group of enemies, kill one, back away to let it explode, repeat. Makes the flow of combat in the mid to late game awful.

- Ledges are really more of a dice roll, sometimes you'll grab them, sometimes you won't. Especially fun over instant death pits.

- While the sprite work is fantastic, it is criminally overused, you will be fighting the same enemies the entire game with larger and larger health and damage pools. Sometimes you'll get palette swap characters and new areas do have 1 or 2 new enemies but it gets old quickly.

- The fast travel system has a shitty UI, please just let me move my cursor around the map freely to pick the point I want to go to as opposed to locking me in place.

- The sidequests are just bad. Usually you'll have to find an item for an NPC, they'll thank you and vanish. No aftermath and sometimes not even an item, it's weird and makes the whole process forgettable.

- The late game areas put little traps everywhere. Icicles that explode when you hit them, powder kegs that explode too, stalactites that fall from the ceiling. Couple this with the exploding enemy deaths I mentioned before and it just feels awful

- Even at very high level your character is incredibly fragile because there is no hit stun. Basically there's no period of immunity so things like this happen:

Engage bomb throwing enemy and melee enemy.
Kill bomb thrower with 2 swings, he drops 3 bomb on the spot where he dies and one bomb in front and behind him
Melee enemy hits me during this, I fall backwards into a dropped bomb that explodes
I am thrown forward by the explosion and into the spot where the bomber died
3 bomb explosions do most of my health
Melee enemy kills me with a follow up

Like a 1 second immunity would be so helpful here to make the process more manageable.

- Really the game isn't bad/hard but the above choices make it so god damned tedious, I was ready to be done by the end of it.