izigame.me

It really sucks, but this game is just okay. Maybe 6/10. I'll give it a thumbs up because I could feel the passion the devs had in making this game.
Art style is great. Very obviously Claymore and Berserk. Amazing. The ascended enemies look great, though there's just a few of them.
That's all that is good about this game, unfortunately. It's very strange, because all they had to do was copy DMC. Somehow, they managed to mess it up. Very tragic. Could've been amazing. I'll try to list down all the things wrong with this game, in no particular order.
- No rising and down attack for the basic sword. Why? :( That's a staple of Classic GOW and DMC. Why would you gimp the starter sword like that? It literally, LITERALLY makes no sense. To encourage using other weapons? Well they'll be used anyway to increase the style points, you've hurt the experience for nothing.
- Style points not visible. The style point system for this is STUPID DIFFICULT. Feels pretty bad, actually. So if it's gonna be overtuned like that, you gotta have the DMC Style Points meter so that dedicated players can keep track of their performance.
- This one is INSANELY BAD. MASSIVELY BAD. Many combos will push enemies AWAY FROM YOU MID-COMBO!!! They will fly super far away after hit 3 from a 5-to-6-hit combo. Why why why? :( Why did you do this to your game??? :( I have been gaming for decades, and I have NEVER EVER seen any game ever do this. It is not done for a reason! Why!?
- Lute needs to be reworked. It just doesn't work. First, the Field System sucks. It just feels bad. Period. I just want to hit things in style. Managing the red and blue field just feels like a chore that doesn't increase the fun factor of the game. Maybe turn it into a 3-hit combo pulse instead. When enemies are hit by the pulses, they are debuffed for a time and can be struck by weapons. There's no feedback to activating the fields. It feels so meh to switch between them.
- LUTE NEEDS TO BE REWORKED. So this game suffers from what rendered Doom Eternal vastly inferior to Doom 2016. They gave the player too much power. Because they gave the player too much power, they had to crank the enemies to 11. This led to a vicious chaotic battlefield where the player feels like very little is in their control (I beat Doom Eternal on Nightmare, btw, don't hit me with that "git gud" nonsense). So in this game, Lute is the problem. She has multiple kinds of "parries". Each kind has a hidden cooldown you don't see. In later levels, all enemies on and off screen are launching attacks at you, which makes Lute parry as much as she can. When that happens, you can no longer hit F to do a manual parry. Which means you've effectively lost the ability as the player, to parry on command. This happens pretty randomly, too. There's no accounting for it since you can't see the cooldown and the number of charges left per parry type. Additionally, it can be quite difficult to account for enemy positioning and attack timing because Lute can randomly stagger, freeze, parry, or knock them up. It's absolute chaos. Compare this to DMC, where YOU are the chaos. YOU are the one managing the hordes, not the AI.
- The synergy system sucks. Basically if you're losing, you're going to lose harder. There is a somewhat similar system at play in DMC, but I don't recall it being THIS punishing. The amount of moves closed off to you for not doing well is insane. Needs rework so that players feel good as they play the game, instead of it feeling like an unrewarding slog.
- No parry for the player. Why? :( Slashing games these days have a block + perfect block system ALWAYS. Because it feels good!
- NO BLINK. It doesn't matter if there are lore reasons behind this. No blink = less fun. Blink was essential for sticking to your target in DMC. It was essentially one of the key elements that made the game feel so damn good to play. You could just layer combo after combo on a single enemy. In this game, there is no such thing. You have to rely on your very inconsistent and unreliable gap-closers.
- Also, your characters should be more conventionally attractive. If you want your game to sell, make them more attractive. Not necessarily wear skimpy outfits like 2b, just make the faces more attractive. Make all the characters look attractive but gruff, given the grimdark setting.
All in all. A valiant effort. Maybe they'll try again. Don't know if it sold well enough to justify a sequel, despite the ending.
Quiet's voice acting was pretty good. There's that.
At the end of the day, the developers failed to make the game about the PLAYER. Instead, they made it about Briar and Lute.