izigame.me

Somewhere between 'rough gem' and 'kinda meh'
Feels kinda harsh to give the thumbs down - maybe read this as an 'indifferent neutral'
The 80% rating feels fair, since the core gameplay mechanics are very solid, but the rest lacks.
The gameplay wants to emulate Sekiro's no-stamina, parry focused, reactive-hyperaggressive gameplay, while also mixing in some Souls/Elden Ring weapon arts - which actually works. Soulslikes have a reputation for being janky, but this game is surprisingly tight & fluid.
Instead of a posture or poise bar, succesful parries and weapon hits 'wound' the enemy, while your secondary attack will 'deplete' these wounds and actually remove health total.
But - and this is questionable - if you don't deplete the wounds fast enough they just heal straight back.
It's just that a lot of the mechanics, except the parry, are not reliable.
And with the enemies getting free massive health regen after like 5 seconds of downtime, the other core mechanic is massively stacked against you - since you obviously don't get any of that.
Sometimes you stagger an enemy out of an attack, 2 seconds later, the same attack hyper-armors through five of your blows. Sometimes weapon arts stagger/launch enemies, sometimes they don't. Enemy attacks can track like 180° and some of them can hit from space because their 'weapon' model suddenly expands to triple their windup size.
Some enemies just relentlessly spam attacks. Their attacks have nigh-infinite tracking, with almost no downtime or recovery, often even having a giant dodge hardcoded into the end of their combo, so you're even more hard pressed getting any actual damage in.
The knife throwing harlequin & twinblade knight minibosses are a particular thorn in my side (yes, skill issue, shut up)...
Enemy variety isn't huge either. Each area has a handful of uniques, and then a bunch of fodder that crosses over between areas.
Being able to re-spec your perks and talents for free at every savepoint is nice and makes you flexible in dealing with different challenges - esp. for the bossfights.
It's just lot of the talents in each tree are mutually exclusive. You'll end up filling the useful slots in no time, and you stop getting perk tokens long before you stop leveling up, rendering EXP mostly useless.
The animations in general are good, except the default run animation - it looks kinda weightless. Y'know, the animation you'll see 70% of the time.
Art design is cool in some places, but slides straight into generic Soulsborne copy in many ways. There's very little here that's impressive or a setpiece - And while it has unlockable shortcuts, that's mostly down to it being just a maze of walls and hallways with the same assets repeated ad nauseam. The areas mostly look the same forwards and backwards...
Bossfights are a very mixed bag as well.
The first bossfight against Odur is decidedly a skill-check, to make sure you're actually using the parry. This game is 100% trying to emulate Sekiro in the sense of 'better learn to parry fast'. It's just that the area doesn't prepare you for it well enough.
Then all of the midgame bossfights are all kinda trash or unremarkable, with only the final three making a positive impression. The actual final boss is suprisingly a lot of fun - but it's also "just" a shadow-clone / mirror clone bossfight.
To round it out, the game has zero voice acting & barely any writing.
10 - 20 word count notes that are fixed in the world & "subtitles" in the bossfightw, with the writings quality just barely sliding under 'amateurish'. I swear you could get the word-count of this game on one of page of A4 paper...
Soooo, not recommended for 25 bucks...
Maybe at a 50 - 75% discount, if you really liked Sekiro's parry focused style.

Some stuff here is cool and the core & bones of the gameplay actually work and feel suprisingly good. It's just the body around the skeleton that isn't very nice ... or just much of it even. Which is half a ARPG's staying power, sadly.
It *does* have a pause function when accessing the inventory & menu though, so huge props for that. Most of the Souslikes I've played just don't, despite all being invariably offline only.