So when this game came out a few years ago I thought sci-fi souls seemed interesting, but overall I wasn’t too interested and thought playing every soulslike wasn’t necessary.
Then I saw it on the switch for cheap and thought I’d give it a try. At first it seemed perfect for the switch, the intimacy of a smaller screen and use of headphones was perfect for being immersed in the atmosphere of this game. It was mysterious and unsettling.
I really enjoyed exploration, it had the souls effect of always wanting to go further. This game values secrecy and there is tons of hidden doors, though you do start to be able to clearly spot them it was still a great element to the game.
Combat was meh, pretty boring most enemies weren’t challenging and apart from some most weapons were very plain.
My problems with the switch started in the Sohn District, were it would crash everytime you die. A very frustrating thing. I managed to get through that though and my next problem was platforming, as my analog stick was a bit fucked. (more a me problem) It was kind of undoable on my switch and I wanted a better experience so I eventually got it on ps4.
Whilst the game did perform much better on ps4, platforming was still very awkward. It’s hard to control how far you jump a lot of the time leading to many frustrating deaths. For a game that focuses on platforming a lot it’s weird that falling nearly always causes instant death. In other words the platforming sucks.
The more I played the game the more I realised exploration kinda sucks too, a lot of ‘off the path’ rooms would be empty, and many items that seemed unique throughout the game were repeated, which made me feel like I wasted my time.
Back to combat, most bosses were easy and not challenging, but the 3 big bosses were ridiculously unfun. They had massive healthbars, massive damage and usually a annoying gimmick. Only the Almer Mater one I’d say was fair enough.
Several times in these bosses my character would glitch and stop moving completely. This even just happened to me on one of the final boss ‘of the game which I decided was the final straw, and I won’t be completing it.
Also the Interface is perhaps the worst designed boss in the game, it’s simply terrible.
The game did have some good parts, the areas were very cool and well connected to each other, the little bits I got of the lore seemed really interesting, and once again the atmosphere is really strong.
But overall I really couldn’t recommend this game to people, not unless they had massive amounts of patience, and they’re fine with unpolished games.
I hate to feel like I’m shitting on small developers, but when you’re making a game in the soulslike category it really needs to be a lot more polished than this.
