The Last Faith Review (Mister Sko)
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.