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Updated review 01.04.2025 - After beating the Game
This game is still awesome, but It may not be for everyone.
I will try to not spoil any details, but this is what I observed.
1. Quality of life improvement compared to other Souls games:
- You can change skill points without costs all the time in the game. Change from Greatsword to dual wield or whatever.
- When you get killed on enemy boss, you gain Souls depending on how far you have progressed in the fight. Meaning Character getting stronger the more you try. Skills are also leveling up by parrying and dodging etc. You don't have to farm trash
- You have an option to recover your lost souls without running to the place you died.
- Elite enemy placement is usually near a short cut from the previous savepoint. Allowing if you fail, that you don't have a too long of a run back.
- Checkpoints are mostly in front of bosses and you usually don't have to engage any trash mobs when running back to the boss.
- Some items that have healing abilites outside of the normal healing spell
- "Invisible Walls" are easier to spot compared to Dark Souls. If you are near a potential invisible wall, the wall get's "wobbly" and you can dash through
- Breakable Ground where you would normally fall through, sometimes make a "cracking" Sound when you get near them. This way you can spot them before running on it and falling to your death
- If you fight near a ledge with an enemy, your sword attacks will NOT make you fall (but only as long as you have stamina and attack).
The game is very intuitive. As long as you pay attention and listen, you can prevent a lot of deaths from the environment. Not like other games where you learn after you died.
2. Gameplay
- The worst part of the gameplay is at the start due to Stamina issue and not having weapon skills yet
- When you don't have the gameplay "clicked" in yet, you will run out of Stamina a lot and everything will feel very SLOW. After you get your combos down, it will get a LOT more fluent. Later in the game, you won't even notice the stamina bar that much.
- Generally very responsive gameplay. This game can get really fast, really quick. You can combo a lot of skills together. Very good thing thoug, when you press the button for the brutal attack, it will cancel all other actions you do. So you automatically cancel your combo to go for the big crit.
- Gameplay could feel repetitve after a while due to the length of the game, and that you get strong Skills quite early (middle of the story)
3. Difficulty
I have played all fromsoft titles and re-killed a lot of bosses. My longest learning points where 8-10 hours of Malenia progress on a saturday (Trying to kill without summons), or 7-10 Hours of learning to hitless Inner Isshin from Sekiro.
I have no issues learning boss moves and taking my time. But some of you maybe do. Or get mad really quick.
This game I have finished without summons and on normal difficulty with a greatsword. It felt really hard. I only had about 3 Main-Bosses which I "first tried" (Most of them early game). But that was about it. I usually needed more tries and died a lot.
The boss that took me the longest was the 3rd Mission (which was now nerfed, which is good). I needed about 3-4 Hours to get through it. After that, I usually needed 1-2 hours of learning depending on the main-boss (sometimes less).
If you play on easy difficulty with summons, I cannot comment on how difficult that still is or not. This is just my experience.
4. Main Boss fights
So the only difficult games I played where mostly fromsoft titles. I didn't play NIOH or NIOH 2, so I cannot compare.
This is my experience from this game:
- The bossfights take long and have usually several phases build into it. Example: Standard moveset from 100%-75%. Adding 1-2 abilities from 75% to 50%. Having a special move at 50%. 1-2 additional moves from 50% until death.
- This is a weird comparison, but the boss fights sometimes feel like playing a raid boss in mythic retail world of warcraft. You have a lot of abilities happening, need to position yourself properly, phase transitions etc. This is a full house of mechanics at some points.
- You can't just only parry or only dodge. The game forces you later to adapt to the boss. Example: If the boss hits you with a flame weapon, you get a burned status effect, regardless if you perfect parry. So you need to dodge the flame weapon attacks and parry the attacks that have no status effect.
- The general boss experience is really good and feel like peak Cinema, especially with the fitting music. They put a lot of thought and work into the fights and it shows when you play it. You have a lot of tools to counter boss moves. If you get the combat down for a boss, you feel like a boss and spam damage like a berserker
5. Story
- I don't know the DnF universe. Story felt good. The Characters are well written. But it is not very deep story wise. But all decisions are understandable and make sense. And you have lot of hot characters (°-°)
6. Game length/Environment
- The general theme for this game is dark. And unfortunately it did not change much. I would have love it if they had more contrast in it (at least some sunshine and a brigter day). But if you like dark themes, it will stay that way mostly.
- I played for about 50 hrs until finishing the game and I did all side-missions and collections. The game feels pretty long. Sometimes it feels it drags itself out too much. I think they could have made it a bit smaller and it would still be good. They re-used a lot of monsters later in game. I don't mind that as I like to smash monsters, but maybe you care about it more than I do.
7. PC Performance
- In 50 hrs of gameplay, only 1 serious crash and 2x fps drops.
- Audio sometimes bugs out when a lot is happening.
- Audio in some cinematics is missing (you can only hear musis and read the text, but no voice speaks)
- I would say this is a damn good performance for a first launch.
8. Subjective opinions
- This game gave me hard headaches at the start. I was so focused on the game and needed to remind me to drink enough water.
- I dreamed about the boss fights (no joke). Especially when I didn't beat a boss before going to sleep, I dreamed about how I could beat it.
- When I did my workout in the gym at 07:00am, I thought about how I will smash that boss I am struggling with. This made me stronger and do more reps while training (it boosted my training moral, getting stronger to deafeat the demons)
9. Conclusion
It is hard. It is rewarding. It feels good. It is fun. You can do so much to improve your gameplay experience in this game how you want.
I had one of the best gaming experiences in my life with this game.
Every heavy Hit I landed, felt great.
Every counter I did, was satisfying.
Every dodge and parry I hit perfectly, made me go BOOM.
Go hard fellas. This is what Action-Games are about. PEAK. I hope they will make another game.