izigame.me

Just finished the game. Got, what I assume is, the bad end. Would not recommend.
First, the good:
the art direction is a strong positive, good color palate use. Nailed the picturesque-with-dark-elements vibe pretty well.
Another positive, much of the level design is pretty good. Very layered and intertwining (I'd go even as far as to say, some of the level design would fit pretty well in a FromSoft game) with some modern niceties, like have checkpoints very close to most bosses.
They even go out of the way to do that thing that FromSoft is known for where at most times you can see where you're going to be and where you've been. Makes the world feel lived in and grounded.
Another positive: iteration time. When you die, you basically instantly respawn, barely any loading screen.

Now...the bad: The performance and bugs. I've never played a Souls-like with more common and easily repeatable bugs and, as an avid Souls and Souls-like player, that's saying something.
Here's a sampling of the bugs I experienced in my 21 hours.
-The menu would suddenly become inoperable, making it so I could no longer push down. Had to fix by resting or dying. This happened about 30 times.
-NPCs wouldn't advance their dialog sometimes. The A button to advance it stopped working. And because you are locked in place and can't freely move away from them, like in FromSoft games, it meant that I had to turn the game off and on again. This happened about 4 times.
-Visual bugs on a few bosses, usually the bigger ones. This a major issue in a game like this, where being able to clearly see tells is critical for an enjoyable experience. Various instances of stretching or snapping animations which lead to a ton of frustration. This happened about 5 times.
-Bosses would just stop fighting. Something in their AI would break and they would just stand there. This happened 2 times, one of the times I was actually grateful that it happened because...
This game suffers from some of the worst FPS issues I've seen in a Souls-like. All but a handful of small areas ran at 20-25 frames per second (yes, I messed with all the settings I could, nothing helped) and, in the case of that one boss fight mentioned above, the FPS would even dip down to 15. That's basically unplayable for a game of this type.
This, combined with how hard enemies track with their attacks and how they tend to snap into the damage portion of their attacks from their wind-up (effectively making their attacks far harder to read then I believe was intended), meant the game was barely playable the standard "intended" way (mixing together dodging, parries, jumping and strafing).
This also meant a few bosses, and a few enemies (but I repeat myself. I'll get to it), had in attack or two that was basically unavoidable.

Beyond the major performance issues, the game suffers from many of the common pit falls of new Souls-likes.
-It commits the cardinal sin (common though it may be) of the genre, which is: it has you fight a boss only for that boss to be a common enemy in the very next area. But it's worse then usual because, here, that regular enemy becomes a boss AGAIN but now there's a guy shooting at you while you're fighting him, or you do a "challenge" event in the very next area and it's that boss AGAIN but now there's two of them and you have to fight on a small platform where you can fall to your death on all sides. Great...and this boss is one of the few with that near unavoidable attack I mentioned too...
This kind of stuff is totally demoralizing. I'm all for reusing bosses from the beginning of the game, if that's what you want to do, but you have to put them close to the END of the game (it can be fun to see a boss from a while ago and see how much stronger you are).
-While weapon variety is pretty good, weapons within their classes have the same movesets and no special qualities apart from one of 4 status they can inflict (which are fun statuses, to be fair). This means you quickly don't really want to check out new weapons you pick up because you know pretty much what you're getting.
-There's also a lot of little things that grind on you as you play, things more experienced devs and players would notice and find annoying such as:
Menus are almost entirely vertical which means once you've started acquiring items, you have to scroll all the way through, from the top, to get to the bottom and you don't even have the option to go from the top and have it roll around to the bottom. This problem was solved back in 2014 in DS2.
Finding new pieces of lore, many of which you find during combat, give you the option of immediately reading it (good idea) but it's timed and because the game doesn't pause (which is deceptive because the menu is made to look like the game is paused), you're left a bit annoyed that you can't read it right then.
You have to stand in a particular spot to interact with an interactable spot. Often you'll find yourself jumping instead of doing what you intend. Which can be made more annoying when you realize ladders aren't actual objects with a hit box, so you'll just walk (or jump) right through them. Which can be deadly if you're thinking of doing the simple task of grabbing the ladder and pushing up to climb but you jump though it instead.
The stagger animation is very subtle and longer then you might expect so the game feels unresponsive as you try to repeat parries you miss. You can roll cancel out of a stagger early, so I started to just assume I was staggered whenever I got hit and reset myself by rolling.
Auto-wall recovery makes it so the camera is constantly readjusting as you get close to wall. It's terrible because it fights you while you might want to see what's behind you. I always turn it off in Souls games. Not such option exists here.

There's more but suffice to say this game needed way more time to cook.